Four Play In Canada

This Is It

2010-07-25T15:49:00.001-07:00

No I'm not referring to Michael Jackson's (R.I.P) tour, the album by Betty Davis or indeed the song by Ryan Adams. I'm talking about the end of our four play in Canada.

Next week, Pip and Alex fly across to Montreal to catch another flight to London. Dave is flying out a few days later and spending a few more weeks of Canada's glorious summer in Montreal. I honestly don't know how much longer I am staying, apart from the fact that my work visa runs out in December... Whatever happens I'll be back in the UK for Christmas, see you then! Thanks for reading.

- Heath XX

mmmm Vancouver sun

2010-07-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

and nite jewel

http://www.myspace.com/nitejewel

On Canadiana, Marriage and the Narrow Road to the Deep South

2010-05-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Over the course of about 6 weeks, from roughly the time we arrived in Vancouver up until about 10 days ago, 3 play in Canada had to drop any pretense that we were having a good time. Apart from our brief sojourn to Coachella we had no money, no jobs that weren't unbearable, constant rain and only Canadians to talk to, culminating in the decision that I discuss in further detail in the last section of this post. We fucked our lives.
Sod's law, however, continuing to uphold its reputation as the one and only universal constant that is not proved true by exceptions, has struck again. For a solid week and a half, there has been nothing but brilliant sunshine, generous paycheques, the discovery of fine bars and adventures into the surrounding wilderness. With no sign of any of these things letting up anytime soon, one might wonder if we were starting to regret our hasty-looking decision. Well, no. The negative aspects of Canada, unchecked weenie-ism (people go to bars and buy energy drinks), quasi-liberal douchebags (lecture you on McDonalds), a toothless, uncynical youth (have been heard to say 'I just don't understand why everyone can't be nice') and last but certainly not least, the price of alcohol and cigarettes remind us time and time again that we're most certainly Europeans to the core. Still, I'm sure we'll miss the remaining 10 weeks in the sun, the beach minutes from the city centre, the bear-infested mountain a few more minutes and Seattle only a few hours, not to mention the way the light sparkl..........

- Ok, Dave, whatever, summer's here and you're having a boss time, but you're still looking forward to being in a place where fellow early-twenties layabouts don't get in a huff when some cigarette smoke blows in their general direction. We get it. Hardly an unusual want is it? Hardly a profound insight. Got anything else for us?

Well, I have some thoughts about some people I met at university that border on coming-of-age Hollywood-philosophy soapbox-internet wank-musings.

- Even that all too self-aware explanation was gay, got anything that you don't wish you'd had published in your teenage Guardian column that never existed?

No

- ......Fiiine

It is with a great amount of an emotion I cannot quite place that I announce the engagement of two of my contemporaries. I'm not going to name them, because I barely know them. This in itself is hardly news, persons of my immediate generation have been getting married since about year 9; emos, christians, working-class people etc etc. No, what makes this pairing significant is that it's the first that I have no inclination to saturate with scorn. As I've just mentioned, I barely came into contact with the happy duo, maybe 4 or 5 conversations with the feminine side whilst at university, and none with the masculine who I'm not even sure attended the same 'Seat of learning'. They were, I believe, a few academic years above me, and few more biological ones, but we hung around the same bars and one club in particular. She, I recall, painted my face once on a night out when I was but a fresher. Long story short, we were barely acquaintances, let alone friends. From what Facebook tells me though, they look like a delightful dyad. Perhaps a trifle younger than I'd like to be if I get engaged, but well within the boundaries of respectability. All this doesn't make me feel old as such, it's merely made me very aware that some time has now actually passed since I began my 'adult' life. The first acceptable, truly contemporary marriage is a definite milestone, people are getting together now, theoretically FOREVER, and having parties to celebrate! Now someone needs to actually send me an invite to one of these things.

- Well, that was fascinating Dave. Truly scintillating. Really, is that it? Actually, don't even answer that, I have utterly lost interest in your pathetic attempts to squeeze even more pathetic observations out of mundane, middle-class occurences.

I could tell you about how Hemingway was the first into occupied Paris, and subsequently liberated The Ritz.

- Now we're talking!

Hellz yeah we are!

- Waaait a minute, is that even true?

No, probably not, all part of the Hemingway mythos blah blah blah. A fantastic story though don't you agree? One can almost see him now, machine gun on one arm, buxom belle on the other, puncturin' Nazis before downing some absinthe in the one corner of Paris he'd 'randomly' chosen to deliver from fascism. Boss.

- Truly. I didn't realise he even fought in WWII though.

He didn't, he was merely there as a journalist. Incidentally though, on the approach to Paris, he started leading a band of French resistance fighters, and was apparently very effective. And that IS true.

- Isn't that against the Geneva convention? A journalist commanding armed troops?

Yup. He was brought up on formal charges, but got away with it by saying his purpose was to 'provide advice'.

- Absolute Lad. Hang on a sec! You guys seem to be reading an awful lot of Hemingway, trampling around the wilderness and getting drunk, all without a moderating female influence!

Not just Hemingway. Also Bukowski.

- Oh God!

Relax, remember, it's still just me Pippy and Bowell.

- Oh yeah, right, I guess. Still, I am a little concerned, when did you say you guys were back on the civillised side of the pond?

I didn't, but since you asked, the portly pair will be touching down around the 28th of July and I'll follow in about a fortnight. Pipkin is taking the incredibly regressive step of moving back to Newcastle (sorry buddy, it just is), while Bowell and I will be CELTA-ing it up in Brighton for a month or so before embarking on a second, more official indulgence of our wanderlust. We're thinking Spain or maybe Japan. Or maybe Mexico. I envision a three-year moritorium on my career, as such, sort of a vocational degree in in cultural studi.....

- Oh shut up you verbose ponce. Three years! You'll be old by then! When are you going to like, do something worthwhile?

I want to be a writer, I need some experience to write about things and shit.

- But you can't write!

I know, I know, I'm kinda hoping no-one will notice. Douglas Coupland seems successful enough.

- You're insane!

God preserve me from sanity!

- God certainly will.

Finger Lickin' Bad

2010-05-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

I just ate a $30 bucket of KFC and now I feel well rough. Eurgh.

Work Trolls #2 The Boss

2010-05-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

Forget David Brent, this bitch is on a whole 'nother level brother. Most days at work, I'm threatened with getting the sack. If not by my boss, then by one of her sycophantic minions. Suck up trolls. They're all ball-busters, probably because they're all women. Women, in general, are ball-busters. Am I right men?

Shit. So, the boss woman wasn't at work in the morning yesterday, so I decided to improve on the deli, add a spark of imagination into the workplace, you know? Instead of 'Wild Salmon with Spring Mix Salad' on the label, I printed out 'Wild Salmon with a verdant spring mix, accompanied by a plethora of veggie treats.' If I were shopping in the store for food (which I'm not, I work there so can just scoff it down anyway), I would say to myself 'My, this sounds interesting. Orthodox salads are, as a rule, properly boring. They lack all taste, and make me far too regular. However, the unusual vocabularly utilised in this label makes me interested in this product, perhaps constipation isn't so fun, I will give this a go.'

Know what my boss said? 'My customers won't understand those labels, you'll have to redo them.' I told her, in no uncertain terms, that her customers were thick and needed to get educated. To demonstrate just how cretinous her customers are, I gave as an example the fact that they were paying outrageous prices for her disgusting products. She wasn't impressed with that. I had to redo the labels.

Fortunately she didn't discover the 'Mozzzzarela panini' products I put out on the shelves.

A few hours later, I'm telling a highly engrossing story to three of my highly-engrossed co-trolls. The boss comes over and tells me twice to stop talking and take out the trash. How very rude, I was only trying to raise morale and thus improve productivity in the deli. I'm getting to the climax of the story, and she goes 'Alex, I've now asked you three times...' and, sick of being interupted, I turn around and say 'Yeah yeah, almost done now.' She gives me a withering look, and storms off. Moody madam.

A bit later she seems to have cooled off. Most of the deli staff have gone home for the day, and it's just me and her left. This girl comes up to the counter and excitedly screeches 'Hi *******, it's me!' Bossy boots gives her a blank stare. 'Oh, you don't remember me :( ' the girl says (I've added the unhappy face to show just how sad she was), and walks off. Five minutes later, my boss remembers who she was - she used to work in the deli. I was a bit surprised that she had forgotten her, and told her this. She said that it wasn't her fault, that she had had a lot of staff come and go recently. I turned to her and said, verbatim, 'It's your fault, you drive them away. You're much too fierce, and so you estrange your staff.'

She didn't take that too well either. I don't understand why she doesn't just fire me.

The World's Deadliest Warrior (or, The World's Wimpiest Blogger)

2010-05-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

As I write this, I'm sat gorging myself on a tub of ice cream (Neapolitan, the multi-racial iced treat), and I'm listening to Joanna Newsom. So you're probably thinking 'What a woofter, poofter, shirt-lifter' (thanks to Viz for that one). Well, quit being so homophobic, ice cream is simply delicious, and female vocalists are just as valid in our society as the superior male musicians, so just stop right there...

Fig.1 Not manly.

Anyway, I'm here today, as a voice of certain authority - I've read Hemmingway and Bukowski, and sometimes catch a bit of WWE Wrestling when I'm channel-flicking - to lecture on how you no longer really need to be a 'man' in this world, as tv basically does it all for you. Well actually, that's not quite true - that's just what I've taken from it. What the TV actually tells you is exactly how being a man should go, and then slightly misinforms you by stating that it only takes 11 minutes a day to become harder and stronger, rougher and tougher, and that no assembly is required, and becoming a man only takes three easy installments, and you get a lifetime guarantee. Guarantee of what, being a meat-head? I'd rather read a good book thanks.

Fig 2. Also not manly. Shame.

There's this one advert right, where this guy attaches some metal and rubber to a door, and just goes ape shit, tugging and pushing and that. This guy is a real man. He looks like Michelangelo sculpted him from purest Masculinium, a preposterous element I just made up. I, on the other hand, who am not pictured in the infomercial, look like I have been sculpted by a small child with plastocine.

Fig. 3. Certainly manly, look at those muscles...

This is a great introduction for beginners, however the best thing on TV for being a manly man is 'The World's Deadliest Warrior.' I wish I hadn't just used the word 'preposterous' above, because it would fit this programme so perfectly. Fortunately I'm a scholar, and have the most verbose language in the planet at my fingertips, so I can also describe it as 'ludicrous', 'ridiculous', and 'obsene'. Not that using synonyms is a manly thing to do.
The premise of the show is that they pit warriors, most of whom lived centuries and continents apart, against each other using a highly complex computer programme made by Slytherin Studios. Impressive stuff. Each warrior type - for example Aztec warrior, William Wallace, Nazi Waffen SS guy, - has a team of 'professionals' who say why their pointy, shooty weapons were the best, and then they stick them into big hunks of cow, or, if budget allows, a fake human being. They use technology to measure speed and power of impacts, then they have a Doctor (who wears hospital scrubs just so you know he's the guy in the know) who sticks his fingers in the wound then goes 'owch' or something equally as informative. The show really helps the wannabe man, as the presenters make gruff noises when you're supposed to, and cheer and high five gratuitously and frequently, so it's easy for a trainee to follow the cues. The climax of the show, when all the figures have been 'punched' into the system (they use 'punched' every episode for a maximum violence quota), sees a recreation of the fight. Always filmed in the Californian hills, no matter whether the combatants lived in the rainforest or were bank clerks who never set foot out of the London suburbs, they cut and thrust for a few minutes, before one dies, and the other beats his chest a la Tarzan and promptly drinks the blood of his vanquished foe.

Fig. 4. Very manly - profusion of pointy weapons and silly hats.

So where does that leave me and my sidekicks? We're not running around the Californian hills dressed as plonkers, and we're not potentially destroying our doorframes (vital points of support in the architecture of our house, an architectural danger which the advert does not make you aware of). We scoff at these muscled morons, and, although we kinda do go 'phwoar, look at that impact' when an axe chops into a pig carcass, we know it's not a real thing. Three layered ice cream is a real thing. Books about fictitous events are real things. Not wishing to be these muscly things who shout 'What's stopping you, Princess?' through the tv, finding it all preposterous - that is the real thing.

Pip & Pip's Excellent Adventure

2010-05-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 13th April
1750 - a tramp offers to give me change for an American $20 note, claiming he needs a mere 25c for a hostel for the night, and certainly not for a hearty rock of crack. An elderly Sikh man urinates on a tree outside Vancouver Central Station. The scene for my epic solo two day roadtrip to California is firmly set.

1800 - Greyhound security leaves a little to be desired:
Guard: "Have you got any alcohol or tools?"
Me: "Um, no."
Guard: "Have a safe trip."

1830 - while waiting for the bus I began my Coachella research, and played Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem. As luck would have it the song 'All My Friends' starts to play as I pull out of the station; the lyric "where are my friends tonight?" has added poignancy, as I will not see the smiling faces of my dearest housemates for another 72 hours. As the album finishes I inexplicably get the song 'The Wheels On The Bus' stuck in my head, and I burst out laughing.

1900 - we drive through Richmond, a thoroughly depressing experience; partly because it appears to be nothing but car showrooms, strip malls, and factories, and partly because the solid Vancouver skyscrapers can be seen in the near distance.

1930 - oh, the joys of US customs. Despite previous experiences back East, this is nearly verging on the enjoyable. The only question I was asked (after trying to explain to him who Pavement were) was "do you have any fresh fruit?" God bless my Dollar-store diet! The first thing I see when we cross the border is a Burger King and about 50 baseball pitches.

2230 - Seattle. The past three hours were uneventful. Seeing as the bus station closes at 11, I quickly locate a 24-hour McDonalds - that is about to close. One of the workers directs me to another one that is definitely 24-hours and that is just around the corner. After struggling to find it for about half an hour, I stumble across it, only to find that it has just closed. A nearby Subway and 2 Starbucks are also all closed, and a helpful man at a local convenience store explained that nothing was open 24-hours in Seattle. Fuck my life. I trudge back towards the bus station, preparing myself for a night 'sleeping' on a bench outside the Courthouse; the irony isn't lost on me. The term 'sleeping rough' is half right - I only manage about half-an-hour, as the cold and lack of comfort, as well as the fear of being attacked or robbed, keeps me awake. The only up-side of this was seeing the illuminated Space Needle up-close and personal. No sign of Frasier though...

Wednesday 14th April
0600 - the bus station reopens and that ugly, smelly, dirty building has never looked so attractive. It feels like the warmest place I have ever been, and basic pleasures like using the restroom and brushing my teeth were an absolute godsend.

1100 - we arrive in Portland, a place where eighteen-year-old kids eat health food and carry books on Feminism, while guys with mohawks roam the streets wearing sandals. It's a true liberal oasis in Oregon, and the rest of the States for that matter - even within a few miles of leaving the city, I went from seeing bumper stickers saying crap like "life is school, love is the lesson" to giant billboards proclaiming the merits of Creationism.

The rest of the journey down to California really merges into one. In between bouts of very light napping, I would admire the striking scenery. Every so often we would arrive in middle-of-nowhere and depressing as hell small towns, all of which seemed to come complete with a Chinese restaurant. I managed to see a raccoon (shame it looked like jam at the side of the road), a pack of coyotes, and some kind of eagle or something. Oh, and there were a number of 'characters' on the bus. There was the bus driver, who called a famous restaurtant chain 'Taco Smell' and persuade me to eat at Burger King instead, which I did with little protest. There was a tramp in one of the stations who was half-dressed as a clown, and who must have just had a shave for the first time in weeks as his face was more blood than flesh. There was the black woman who spent the entire journey wrapped head-to-toe like a mummy in a white shroud, emerging every so often to nibble at some homemade fried chicken. There was the moronic ex-soldier who didn't know the difference between England and Great Britain ("you speak English in Britain, right?"), and whose grandfather has been in the SS - although fair play to the lad, he was condemning of his family's Nazi past. There was the haggard former crack addict, who had the smallest toes I have ever seen on a woman. There was the drunk Alaskan fisherwoman (I know, I didn't think they existed either) who tried to chat up a fellow passenger in what was one of the funniest moments of my life"

Her: "You smell nice - like wood. Very barky."
Him: [Laughing awkwardly] "Oh, I doubt it..."
Her: "Well it ain't me, I smell like ass!"

Oh, and we managed to pick up and drop off about a dozen members of the same Mexican family along the way as well...

Thursday 15th April
First point of call in Indio was the liqior store. I asked some nearby youths for directions, and one of the kids, who must have been no older than twelve, offered me some drugs instead...
Upon arriving at the festival site, I realised my Canadian phone wouldn't work in America (bloody ridiculous) and consequently had no way of contacting the rest of my party. Not majorly bad news in the grand scheme of things, apart from the fact that they had the tent. Step forward two lovely ladies by the name of Hazel (a comic book artist in Portland) and Leen (a Rwandan living in Northern California who was about to embark on a five-year round-the-world bike ride) who I had met on the bus and who put me up for the night. Having had basically no sleep for nearly 60 hours, even the fact that three of us were crammed into a hot, smelly, sweaty two-person tent could stop me falling asleep as soon as my head hit the ground. The nicest shower of my life at 6 the next morning followed by a breakfast burrito and a spell reading in the shade away from the harsh Californian sun all made for a good mood that wasn't to leave me once for the next three days. Thanks to a handy on-site internet cafe, I managed to find the others thanks to the medium that is Facebook, and the next three days passed in a blaze of booze, music, laughter and walking around with no shoes on. The trip back wasn't nearly half as fun as the ride down, mainly because there was no Coachella to look forward to.

Canada, I hate you, and you're bringing me down...

2010-04-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

I have strived to make this post as punchy, erudite, learned, lucid, high-brow, amusing and 'urgent' as possible. In age-old English student style, I have stolen the words of an other to portray my own thoughts:

'Fuck you shit hole [In this case Canada], we're going to get wasted in the promised land, Coachella, California. An exodus is what it is. We set out for the land of suntans, cheap alcohol, LCD Soundsystem, Fever Ray and Pavement.' (Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath, page 27, (Faber & Faber, 2010), slightly edited by Bowell, Copley, Welsh, and Wingrave.'

Can't argue with literary genius now can you.

See you in a week, suckers.

Work Trolls #1 - The fat bitch who claims to be really popular with guys, but is obviously just a Rough.

2010-04-05T20:21:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer: Bowell did not write this, and this is not about you if you work with Bowell, so if you read it and it's about you, then it's not about you, it's about someone that Bowell works with, and remember that you don't actually work with Bowell. All Bowells in this account are purely fictional. Any offense caused by this article was purely intentional.

Yeah, the troll concept is back! And you thought that it had been left out accidentally overnight, been subjected to sunlight, and had turned to stone! Lolz, humour based on nerdy magical creatures is funny! (Man, I need some female attention in my life).

So, obviously now that we live in a princely castle, (we've had the east wing redecorated in preparation for your multiple visits by the way) we aint coming across any hostel trolls no more. Shame, I miss those creepy critters. So where do I go now for my fill of society's hidden gems? Well, when one side taketh, another giveth, and as it happens, the organic deli that employs me has a few not-so-organic (more horrifically genetically modified) trolls of it's own. These perfect little stereotypes of the sort of people I dislike seem to have been gifted me on a platter, and I would be a fool not to share them in hors d'oeuvre-style snippets, one at a time so that you don't get indigestion (and so I can drag out the concept to its exhausted zenith). So let's start with a real beauty (metaphorically speaking, she's actually a Rough).

Because my co-workers may well be reading this, (I can't remember if I shared the blog with them), I shall protect Katie's identity by calling her 'Fatty'. Fatty is very friendly - this is often the case with Fattys as they think you're going to help feed them up, expecting that you will toss them a burger fries drink combo if they crack a joke or something. Short, squat, dumpy, frumpy, clumpy: fugly. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a fatist. I love the fats, they make me feel better about myself, they keep hard-working local businesses such as MacDonalds and KFC alive and kicking, and they help populate the audiences of top tv 'help' shows like Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer. The lads and I were discussing this, and we don't go for these ridiculous 'supermodel' body shape that the mens mags dictate we go drooling after - we're not ashamed to state that we like a girl with curves. As long as the curves are luscious big tits, tiny waist, and tidy arse.

See, men aren't pigs.

But no, wait! I must need my eyesight tested - according to Fatty, her male friends are, to offer you a sort of generalised, you get the gist kind of quote: 'always getting a crush on me as soon as we become close'. She can't be a Fatty, she must be a siren - she herself has told us, in cross her heart hope to die stick a needle in her eye honesty, that she's really attractive to the opposite sex.

Except that she is really a Fatty, and really not a sexy siren - how can I tell? Fat folds visible beneath her jeans.

Ranteroo

2010-03-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

Yo, people from England, how's it going?

Where are you currently, whilst you're reading this tour de force? At work? Of course you're not, you're all work-shy bums. You're probably in a 'librey' or an 'univercity' or an 'office in Guildford high street pushin paper and computers but really just forwarding me rude, often pictorial emails that similar middle aged 'professionals' have sent you''... Oh yeah, and you're not working cus you're still locked into that ridiculous recession. Yeah, well, like I give two shits, I've been at work for 5 days straight now, and it sucks ballz. It's killing me: the early hours, the late finishing, the inability to drink at lunchtime, the morons who hold these menial customer service jobs (clearly Je am an exception), and the mountains of food that I'm not able to eat until my bitch of a boss turns her back.

I'm changing before my eyes (see image for confirmation), for example I now say 'Have a nice day' to customers. Without prompting. Yukky, vom, roughmatron. What the hell happened to the 'Go fuck yourself, dickhead' that my English education taught me was the correct way to address people with more money than sense. Of course, I don't mean them to have a good day, I mean sod off now so I can mop this counter top for the 10th time today. I don't wish them to enjoy this overpriced 'health food' (by the way, I'm working at an organic deli if you're a lazy git and haven't bothered to read my last posts), I wish them to get a horrific wallet-destroying, common-sense-implanting disease from their Moroccan chickpea squelch.

I got told by the store manager today, via aforementioned Queen Bitch, to pull my trousers up as when he passed me the other day, whilst I was bent over backwards helping Donald Trump or someone, he could see that they were down to my knees. Screw your hyperbole, who are you, my dad? No, my Dad's working hard in an office on Guildford high street, doing a real job - I have the emails to prove it.

So now I have a couple of days off (they let me out for lewd behaviour), and what am I going to do?

I don't know. I just don't know - what are you supposed to do during your weekend? Now that I'm a professional, am I supposed to go play golf tomorrow morning? Or cus I'm young free and single (sigh), am I supposed to go piss away my earnings in bars and clubs, and wake up with a beastly hangover (and a beastly Geordie lass)? No, that's the English way - over here wieners don't drink, cus... Well, why not? Beer makes you happy, keeps you in good shape, makes you and others more attractive, and... hell, why am I telling you this? Preaching to the choir really isn't it.

Canadians are pretty bloody boring people. That's all I wanted to say really.

A note from Vancouver

2010-03-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

HI. Yes, as the others have said... we are still alive! We just needed to take some time out to find a place to live and some way of getting the cash flow going the right way again.

After weeks of keeping our eyes and ears glued to Craigslist, three of us have jobs, all of us have a place to live and one of us is on the verge of managing his very own restaurant. Oh and that one also went and got a tattoo.

Luckily Vancouver is pretty darn cool and we are finding our way around the 'cool' streets, gig venues and crack addicts (they literally swarm the streets downtown). So far the Top 10 looks something like this:

1. The blossom trees that seem to sprowt all over the place

2. Bon's $2.95 all day breakfast

3. Hon's Chinese place, (as good as but not linked to Bon's)

4. Main street

5. Commercial street

6. Audiopile/Scratch records

7. Sneaking cheap snacks at Alex's work when they are really ridiculously over-priced

8. We really want to see Stanley Park and the Aquarium, maybe they would be here if we had the time....watch this space.

'employment' or 'why doesn't the word work rhyme with dork?'

2010-03-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

When we relayed our plan of moving to Canada to family and friends, the reactions were not, ermm, uniformly positive. 'Get a job, hippy' and 'Why the fucking hell are you going to Canada in the middle of winter you twat' may possibly have been uttered.

Well, we've done what we said we would. We've travelled the length of this less-than-petit landmass, we've settled where we said we were going to, rented a house, and now have jobs. So there.
But wait, what was that last bit? Ah yes, employment. Well, all that money we sequestered and saved wasn't going to last forever now was it? Maybe if we'd gone to a proper gap-year location, one with poories and coups every 3 weeks, met other year-off bums, 90% of which would have been called Felicity or Sebastian, worn their ugg boots and gillets on the beach and then complained that there was no polo pitch on the island of oingoboingo to their oxbridge friends come september, it would have done. But that would have sucked ballz even more than this does.

So, what do I now do for a 'living'? I have absolutely no idea. Absolutely, positively, not a clue. No one will tell me. when I first recieved the voicemail about the interview, the name of the company was unclear, and the business didn't seem to have a presence on google. Great. After an intense google-mapping session I at least found out where it was, and trotted off in the morning with my best blagging lips on. Enter Interviewer: 'Did Angie tell you what the job entails?' Enter a a now optimistic Dave: 'No, she didn't actually', 'Oh, well that's odd'.

And that was it.

She didn't bother to enlighten me about that which 'Angie' had passed over in silence. Luckily, these corporate automatons always ask the same kind of questions, so I answered as generically and as unspecifically as possible and, lo and behold, got the job. Whatever that may be.

These details, however, I am aware of:

There are 3 'teams' that, quite possibly, are involved in some kind of 'team-work' and she will be calling in a day or so to tell me which one I'm on.

They are something to do with a 'market' and something to do with a 'mall' and something to do with 'credit'.

My interviewer looked like gin-soaked whore.

And again, that's it.

No matter how much I hinted that she should provide some kind of job description, she wouldn't give up the goods. So, what else can I say? I start work at the latest on monday, I'm sure I'll pick up whatever I'm meant to be picking up quickly. And I'm sure it won't turn out anything like that bit in Black Books where Fran gets a mystifying office job.

Well, a man can dream.

So, Vancouver eh?

2010-03-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

N.B. I have been informed that my old man sends my grandma hard copies of the blogs I write, and have been told to cut out the cussing cus she ain't one for cussing, so this blog is going to be clean as I can possibly make it.

Crikey O' Riley, we've been here for 3 weeks or so now, and have hardly made a comment about our time in the city. Is that because we've been so busy imbibing ourselves with numerous soft and hard liquors in the city's various saloons, or is it because we have now urinated all our money up the wall, have no experiences to share, and only have an impressive collection of records to show for our efforts? Both.

That was a fairly respectable opening now wasn't it.

So what's new? We have a basement. And the basement has the most impressive series of dips, leans, angles and double diamond black slopes in it that it's a wonder it's standing up at all. Well, standing it is, and paying we are. We have a large living room/dining room/kitchen area, where, whenever I get back from work (more on that in a min), Pip, and sometimes the others, are slobbed out in front of the tv, Jabba the Hut style (that's a reference to Star Wars Grandma, it was a highly successful science fiction film in the 70s and the 80s, noted for it's use of special effects and for a certain costume that the character Princess Leia wears). The conversation then goes:

The others: 'How was your day Bowell?'
Bowell: 'I'm darned tired, chaps'
The others: 'Yeah, so are we, we've been glued to the sofa since we woke up, and have watched....' And then they list about a week's worth of tv.

And Pip has this irritating knack of flicking through the chanels whenever the particular programme you're watching takes yet another break. So instead of catching the half a dozen adverts being broadcast on the channel you were on, you see snippets from two dozen adverts as they flash up for a couple of seconds, thus drastically increasing your intake of pants North American adverts.

Needless to say we're slowly filling our gaff with cheapo thrifted furniture, stolen/borrowed posters, stuff from the dollar store (all things $1.25 or less!), and mountains of dirty dishes. No no, it's not disgusting Grandma, it's an art instillation - we're recreating the Rockies in our kitchen, the grit and grime on the plates symbolising our dissatisfaction at pollution and the like, and the effect human consumption is having on the natural world.

We've been to a few gigs too, and they've been largely disastrous, (read here http://theclickofalight.blogspot.com/) but we have high hopes for the next lot, and so have continued to squander our remaining Queens on gig tickets. Now we're broke.

But Dave and Heath have gotten jobs, and Pip is becoming a restaurant tycoon by the sounds of things, so things could be worse. And me? I've become the cheekiest deli clerk in the land at an organic foods store, have eaten about 10 bucks of high quality proscuttio behind my manager's back, and have not given in to the urge to clunk several stupid rich Canadians over the head with a chopping board after they've picked a fight over my customer relations techniques. I'm British you nincompoops, of course I'm insolent and arrogant!

And that's about it. That was pretty grandma-friendly wasn't it? The content was acceptable, and the language was clean - I didn't say 'fucking' once, for example...

Update-a-roo

2010-03-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

No we're not dead, we've have found a lush house and consequently have no access to the ol' interweb. Normal service will resume ASAP.

Insomnia Writes...

2010-03-11T06:16:00.001-08:00

Blargl. 5 in the morning and I still can't sleep. Why not? I had enough beer to 'help me sleep', and was fairly energetic yesterday, and now I seem to be putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5. Something don't add up boss. So Je blog whilst the remaining three quarters of team fourplay recharge, some with gentle wheezing (Dave), others with sleep talking/yelping (Heather), and one with not-so-covert flatulence (Pip, who else?). I'd take a video of the sleeping cherubs, and those three, and upload it for your amusement, but I'd probably get convicted of being creepy.

But don't feel pity, I gots me a liter of chocolate milk (I find it's the best way to get my daily dose of calcium and fat at the same time) close beside me.

So what's new with us? Well, we've got a house. We saw it yesterday, started giggling with joy because it wasn't in some crack-hell part of town, even didn't mind these ridiculous fur-ball 'dogs' they have, and said we'd take it. 2 hours later, as we're perusing a record emporium, we get the call, and jump for joy. We're going over in a couple of hours to sign paper and give them a few thousand IN CASH as a safety deposit. Well, I've heard of safer... We should hopefully move in within the week, get a craigslisted hifi wired up within the hour, and then have an almighty house party within the day. We did actually tell them that we're pretty quiet and don't party that much, and that none of us smoke, and that we've all got job interviews, but if you don't lie a bit whilst getting a house, how are you ever going to get a place?

And it was partly a truthie - I have a job interview on Friday for some organic foods place (I'm all about the organic me), Pip is going to an open interview in a week, and Heath has already accomplished 2 similars. Don't wanna work though.

So what else did we get yesterday? I'm sure you'll hear the rest from someone else pretty sharpish... I can't spill all the beans now can Je.

Right. The sun is flirting with the window pane, the chocolate milk has turned into dregs in the carton, and my phone card is burning to be used. I'll bid you adieu, as another day is about to start.

Death Wish 4 - The Crackdown

2010-03-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

Shit it was like a month ago or some incalculable period that we watched this bad boy. It's as good as the cover and sous-titre 'The Crackdown' suggest. Well it's actually gash, but it's well good.

The plot, as far as the scriptwriters bothered to add one (this is the 4th in the series, a certain level of slacking is to be expected), is that loads of bemullted drug dealers get their asses capped by Charles 'I'll make a meat pinata out of you' Bronson. The directorial powerhouse J. Lee Thompson, who coincidentally only made 2 films after this one, opts for rocket launchers and a climax set in a roller disco rather than elaborate plot structures and detailed characterisations.

There's a bit in an amusement arcade I think. And I also think there was a bit where a cop turns out to be bent. And there was possibly a bit when somebody begged for forgiveness but were shot anyway. And there were some explosions. And the baddie dies, and the goody wins, so maybe the lazy scripties actually put a lot of effort in after all to pull that one out of the bag.

We need a life.

Vancouver give me a job

2010-03-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

It started off so well. Heath and I, pumped up with a night on a Greyhound and the remnants of an elk burger rotting in our bellies, stumbled into our Vancouver hostel, and moments later were pounding the streets, full of that naivety that inflates the job-hunter to dangerous levels.

One hour down, we're armed and dangerous with our Social Insurance Numbers.

Two hours down, we're built up our arsenal to include a mobile phone (we all now have exactly the same model as it's the cheapest in the land), and we're beside ourselves with merriment - no world-destruction-bent villain has stocked up as fast as we...

Four hours down, after un peu de respite in a coffee shop, we're in the YWCA job centre, abusing their free internet and photocopying. By now we're giddy with our success, predicting dozens of job offers before the end of the next day.

'Sorry guys, I don't wanna piss on your parade, but those CVs won't cut it over here' we are told by a 'helpful' employee as we go to photocopy a forest's worth of CVs. Bang. Bubble burst. It turns out that nobody gives two shits about your 'education' here, so the last 3 years at uni, and all the rest before that, mean pretty much zilch. Not really news to us if we're being honest, we knew it was a waste of time, but we played ball, jumped through the hoops, and now don't even get to whack 'I gots a Bachelor de Arts yo' at the top of our resumay. 'School 'n' that' goes as an afterthought at the end of your c.v., a footnote right after 'And I like readin and music and lookin at gurlz on the internet and chatting on my cell phone...'

Over here, you have to have an objective. Nope, 'I need money to survive' aint gonna cut it. You have to put some wanky articulation like 'I wish to contribute my 5 years experience as customer service employee (read 'acne ridden burger flipper') to create a positive environment (read 'somewhere where fatties can stuff their gobs') for valued your clientele (read 'fats').'

And there's no jobs either. Or there are, but they're not in boss record shops or 'kooky' independent book stores, so what the hell do I wanna work for them for? Oh yeah, that surviving thing... Looks like we're going to have to branch out and become more employable - maybe another degree will do the job.

Stay tuned for 'Vancouver give me a job Part 2: How I became a gigolo'...

The Ultimate Rockies Top 10

2010-03-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

Because I broke my hand and forgot to do top 10s for each place.

1. The Jasper HI hostel- one of the bestest

2. Meeting over-friendly Elk (top 10 but also top ahhfuck)

3. Skiingskiingskiingfast

4. Hiking then having a beer at the top

5. Finding Patrick

6. Hurling ourselves down a hill on matresses in the dark

7. Somehow managing to get roped into karaoke again

8. Wings night

9. People watching at the hot springs

10. Chairs by the river in Lake Louise

'Each with a tale to tell' or 'Why my day fucking ruled, and Pip had a shit time.'

2010-02-28T12:58:00.000-08:00

While poor, poor Pippy was wrestling with Canada's practically non-existent public transport system, I was sleeping. For the most part. When Pip opted for the semi-overnight Greyhound from Banff to Fernie that would deliver him in at 3am, I voiced my learned opinion that this would be really rather not topping. He, being the headstrong young whippet that he is, of course, disregarded this erudite piece of advice. As you may be able to tell from the previous post, the lesson form all of this is to always listen to your friendly*, caring*, neighborhood Dave.

I rose at the very civilized time of 9.30 and enjoyed the complimentary pancake breakfast that the hostel had provided, calmly packed my bag and even had time for an hour long call to Paris and a muck about on facebook before checking out. Having then enjoyed a 'wildercig' (a cigarette made all the better by a breathtaking view of the surrounding rockies), I began my longest hitching adventure yet.
Now, in the end, it took 5 lifts to get to Fernie and meet up with a very crestfallen Copley. Everyone I met and rode with had a little tale to tell. Hence, I feel the best way to explore my day is to take it driver by driver. All names are invented, as, while they did introduce themselves, I probably wasn't listening or giving a shit.

Ride 1: Banff-Raduim Springs turnoff. Our adoptive German friend took 20 seconds to hitch a ride from Lake Louise to Banff, a record that should have stood unbroken for years. No sooner had I put my bag on my back outside of the hostel however, when a Mexican couple pulled up and asked if I needed a ride anywhere. While technically not hitching, as my thumb didn't come in to play, the whole process took a maximum of 9 seconds. Win. My hosts were possibly the only people all day who made me fell a bit nervous, mainly because all of their anecdotes gradually rose in volume and pitch as they told them in thick-as-hell accents. What I did manage to gather was that they'd been in the States and had driven up to the rockies to meet some friends, had been there a few days and were now-a flyeeeng home verey farst, becaarse mehihans hate-a snow!

Ride 2: To Invermere. I waited about 15 minutes for my next ride, a classic hippy yoga instructor. She was so thrilled to have a English passenger that she kept stopping to show me things, and at one point even made me go on a walk in the woods. All of this was very much appreciated and as we don't have a car, I wouldn't have gotten to most of these places any other way. But by the 4th or 5th stop I was wondering if we were ever actually going to get anywhere. Damn Hippies.

Ride 3: To Fairmont. This was my longest wait, about 40 minutes. It may be something to do with the fact that Invermere is little more than a glorified truck stop, and 90% of the people who were driving in my direction were mustached, single males in massive small-dick trucks. I was eventually picked up by a lovely woman who could only drive me about 30km, but anything is better than nothing and I wanted out of Invermere, fast. it turned out she was that rarest of professionals, the aboriginal language teacher. Being white, she proudly proclaimed, made her unique as the only outsider to become fluent in the language of the local natives for more than 100 years. I can't remember the name of the tribe, but apparently their language is an isolate, and there are fewer than 50 speakers left in the world, including my chauffeur. The website she helps to run, First Voices, is dedicated to the preservation of indigenous tongues. However, I say, get English or get extinct.

Ride 4: To Cranbrook. I was only standing for about another 5 minutes when a truck pulled up and I started my journey with the coolest driver of the day. An old hippy-turned-helicopter-pilot (?) Carl had hitch-hiked around the entirety of Europe in his youth and was full of interesting facts about the Kootenays, the Wide plains-valleys we were driving through. It is honestly one of the most beautiful drives I have ever been on, and very much what the world thinks all of Canada to be like: Golden plains full of horses and cattle set against forests, vast blue lakes and snow capped mountains. Carl even took the scenic route and stopped at an old abandoned gold-rush ghost town, which looked incredible in the heavy, golden light of the early evening. Oh yeah, and we saw a bald eagle in a tree. Carl wasn't really impressed as 'you get them everywhere around here'. I was jumping up and down.

Ride 5: To Fernie. Carl, unfortunately, couldn't take me all of the way to Fernie as it was 'meatloaf night' at home (he actually said this) and he didn't want to be late, so we parted ways. After about 20 minutes, I got my final lift of the day. Ol' Ed was a sawmill labourer and had by far the saddest back-story. Starting university in the late 60s, he had to return home to look after his ailing mother and his father got the a job at the local sawmill that he continues to work to this day. He was very curious about all the places I'd been to in Europe and elsewhere and repeatedly, wistfully stated that I was right to do it when I was young and that he wished he'd managed it. It's a cliche to say so, but this sort of thing really does make you realise how lucky you are. Ol' Ed wasn't actually going to Fernie but the preceding town, Elko, 40km before my destination. He drove me all the way anyway, as his 'good deed' for the day. Absolute hero.

So I arrived in Fernie, which I found to be a pretty, pleasant mountain town. The whole trip took a little over 6 hours door-to-door and cost precisely zero dollarz. I eventually found Pip who regailed me with horror stories. The we went and bought beer and I settled back with the warm feeling that I'd been right. Again. As always.

No One Gives A Shit About...Fernie

2010-02-27T13:39:00.000-08:00

Don't you hate it when it's a massive ballache to get somewhere? And don't you hate it even more when the place you get to wasn't worth all the hassle? Welcome to Fernie, and welcome to my life. Let me set the scene. After hitchkiking from Lake Louise to Banff with some guy named Mitchell (who was pretty sound, apart from having an iPod that sounded like a Tony Hawk's soundtrack and claiming that there was nowhere left to travel in the world other than Peru and Thailand), I left the rest of the gang and set out on my own travels. I just felt that I had to go on a personal journey of self-discovery, one that required isolation and meditation...or I couldn't be arsed to spend a day in sucky Banff while everyone else went skiing. One of the two. Anyways, I caught a bus from Banff to Cranbrook at about 7:30pm, and all was fine. The bus driver was an absolute hero, driving two girls direct to their hotel instead of leaving them in the middle of nowhere. We also stumbled across a five-mile long herd of deer crossing the road, but his skills to pay the bills (I think he had powers like Samson, only in his beard) prevented us from making Bambi pate. I arrived in Cranbrook at about 11:30, and because the bus station was closed, quickly located a nearby 24-hour Tim Hortons and settled myself in for a two-hour wait with a hot chocolate and a book. Upon returning to the station, some old guy gets out of his pick-up truck and tells me the bus I was meant to get had crashed (no-one hurt, thankfully) and that Greyhound was putting everyone on the bus up in a motel for the night. But what about me?! Me and some Chinese guy (he barely spoke English, which led to scintillating conversation, I assure you) waited around in case someone from Greyhound turned up to give us alternative transport or a bed for the night - no dice. Instead I froze my tits off in the cold for over an hour; luckily the Chinese guy, who bought me a second hot chocolate, had a high-quality bootleg copy of Avatar on his laptop, so we watched that to pass the time. I got bored of waiting at about 2:30am, and after explaining to the Chinese guy that I was going to find a hotel - he just sat there saying "oh fucking hell" over and over again - set out on my quest. I asked at the Tim Hortons, and some twelve-year-old girl who was so stoned that after a dozen-word conversation I came out reeking of the green stuff advised me which "pretty sketchy" motels to avoid. I tried the wonderfully named Hospitality Lodge, but it was shut. I tried the Kootenay Inn, but that was also shut. I even tried the Butterfield International Hotel, which promised me a prince sized bed, tea making facilities, two drawers and a front door key. Alas, that was also shut. The only place I could find was the Best Western, which charged me over $100 for six hours sleep. True, it was the best six hours sleep I've had on this trip, but that's not the point. After raiding the hotel room for swag and booty (I came away with a bottle of shampoo, a pen and pad of paper, an envelope (?!), a pouch of coffee and two tea bags), I headed back to the station ready for a shouting match with the staff there. Unfortunately, they were incredibly helpful, putting me on the next available bus, and advising me how to reclaim my hotel expenses (high-quality porn and raiding the mini fridge were neccessary, dammit!) While waiting for said bus, I encountered a number of classic bus trolls - from 80s-fashion-sense-and-facial-hair-man-from-small-town through old-woman-travelling-on-her-own-to-see-her-granddaughter all the way to white-hippie-with-dreadlocks. The latter was especially stereotypical; while the bus was being loaded with luggage, many of the passengers passed the time by using the washroom, having a smoke or getting some food. White-hippie-with-dreadlocks instead sat on the floor and strummed her ukulele for half an hour. Oh, and she also had a feather in her hair - not a majestic eagle feather or anything, but one of those grey, disease-ridden ones you see floating on every scummy pond back in the UK. Yuck. As my sixth form English teacher once said, "never trust a white person with dreadlocks" - how right he was. When I finally arrived in Fernie, 10 hours later than planned, I immediately regretted it. The place SUCKS! It's just a few motels and gas stations alongside the highway, as well as a curling 'arena'. The hostel is full of snow-douches who could rival those infesting Banff - they spend their free time watching videos of professional snowboarders and saying stuff like "I could easily do that...you know, if I wanted to" - and the town is full of local douches who, within five minutes of me stepping out of the hostel, asked my why some bar wasn't open (maybe cos it's 2 in the afternoon?!), told me to call some Canadian athlete a "cunt" because she hadn't won gold (what a failure, ONLY winning a silver medal!), before mooning me and walking off. These weren't kids; they were forty-year-old grown men! The only redeeming feature to the place, which I hope someone nukes in the next week or so, is the A&W; walking distance from the hostel, it sold Baby Burgers (bringing my quest one step nearer to completion) and served drinks in big glass tankards as opposed to cardboard cups. Lush!
I'm getting the hell out of Fernie as soon as possible, and I advise everyone else to do the same.

The Wildershit

2010-02-26T20:47:00.000-08:00

It seems like mere moments ago that I was waxing lyrical about the wilderpiss, about how free I have felt here in the Rockies whilst stood legs astride a mountain top, urin... well, I'm sure you remember. Everybody loves sequels (as proof I refer to the film Death Wish 4, which truly deserves a blog all of its own, a destiny I will fulfill posthaste), so here is the wildershit:

Unlike pissing outdoors, which is pretty usual fare for a chap going for a country walk, or who is drunk and stumbling through the streets of Newcastle at 4 in the morning, crapping outdoors is a no no; pretty much all the time. We humans like to think we're superior to animals - and we are, we know that it's just not done to drop 'trou' and lay down our scented nuggets in the middle of a hiking trail, as the mooses and bearses do around here. We have standards. That's why the 'western toilet' is my all time number one invention.

Due to the complete lack of plumbing in these wilderness hostels we've been visiting, many of the nation's finest minds have grouped together to design a special type of toilet cabin just for us travelers. After hours of hard-thinking, these scientists developed the concept of a hole in the ground (stench wells), and designed a highly complex plastic throne upon which one can perch. If you need to create a crap in the nighttime (here the scientists missed a trick), one must utilise either the faint glow off their iPod screen, or spend half an hour lighting handfuls of tea candles (only if the hostel was thoughtful enough to provide) so that you have enough light to defecate by. Haste must be employed to prevent buttock adhesion to the lid, and bravery is a must as the level or wildlife rustling in the bushes always multiplies when you're alone on the throne.

Here's a photo I took earlier:

As a bloke, one of the joys of life is taking time over bowel movements (Je went there), settling down for a cosy read of some close-to-hand literature, and reflecting upon philosophical concerns. Not with the wildershit. As with an SAS counter-terrorist operation in a war-torn country, it's all about a quick in and out of the cabin before ammonia-induced gagging commences, leave the women and children unharmed, and most importantly never put yourself in danger. And I should know, I've completed loadsa Tom Clancy video games...

To sum up - try and hold it in till you reach civilisation again.

It's been a while...

2010-02-25T10:46:00.000-08:00

...since I've managed to write even a teeny tiny liccle post on here. And the reason is quite simple, body and mind was taken over by an evil claw. Yeah, like Alex's post explains - I broke my hand - and because one of the bones in my right hand slipped to the side (look away now if you're squeamish) I had to have it pulled back into place and then set in a very claw like cast. Things just weren't the same after this. I started to think like a cartoon super-villain and use my claw to make evil things happen all around me. I even bought a swishy chair and a cat.

Now I've only got 2 weeks left in the cast and have gradually been able to take-over the evil spirit that formed inside me (most of the time), enough so that I can even write about it. Breaking your hand in a country where you have to pay for medical expenses before you can claim on your insurance sucks. The only good part about it is lying about how you broke your bones. After the initial fall we got Pip to believe I had been bitten by somebody's dog, going as far as to say we had to go identify it in a police line-up the next day! And that was just the start of the lies, the night we found out I had really truly fucked up my hand and it wasn't "just a sprain" as I'd hoped, we did what we know how to do best: drink. And being in prime snow-douche country at the time, everyone in the bar started asking "you do that on the hill?", or "that happen on your board?". Suddenly I became very interesting to the snow-douche elite. Once I knew this I just sat back and enjoyed it, the lies came very easily; "yeah, did it on that black in Marmot trying out a 360" I replied, "but no biggie, I just like pushing it to the limits".

It soon got tiresome though, literally every man and his dog were asking me about my hand. Apparently it's a good conversation starter. By now I just agree with what people think I may have done; "How'd you do that, boarding?", yeah whatever I did it doing a 7 on my snowboard at the olympics. I did it when a massive cougar came out and chased me down the slope. After all the fun I've had lying, now I just want my right hand back.

This is the end, dum dum dum dum........

2010-02-21T15:27:00.000-08:00

Perusing the 'snack' section of the local supermarket in Lake Louise I was vaguely amused that they'd even bothered to name it as such, seeing as it occupied so much of the shop that the two had practically become synonymous. My amusement soon turned to disbelief, then rage and finally depression, however, when I saw the tag-line said supermarket was using for said snack section. Can we have a drum roll please for one of the worst (best?), most morally vacuous pieces of advertising that I have ever had the misfortune of becoming a target market for:

'Food........ for the fun of it!'

What the hell? Words cannot adequately show how utterly awful this has made me feel. Have we, as consumers, become such fodder for the producers of the mass produced that they consider a slogan which essentially reads 'Hey! You! You don't even need this product but, what the hell, buy it anyway!' an example of canny marketing?

Of course, the entirety of western consumer culture is based solely on convincing people of just that elucidation, but previously we at least had the courtesy of disguise; at least they pretended we needed what they were selling, we were at least given the benefit of the doubt as to our collective intelligence. Not anymore it seems, that last pitiful vestige destroyed in the Rockies of all places.
Could it be that the aftershocks of the credit crunch are still being felt in the snack industry? It's certainly the case that in tougher times advertisements move much more towards the 'Just fucking buy our fucking shit' end of the subtlety spectrum, but I would have thought even the most ardent minimalist would have balked when the ad agency unveiled this little doozy. Apparently not.

What's much more depressing about this however, is not what the company thinks of us consumers, but what this says about their faith in our society. It's as if they've just completely given up, thrown in the towel and are admitting as such.
'Look, guys, we all knew it was a farce, yeah? You knew you didn't need all that new junk, or 48 varieties of the same chocolate bar and frankly, we can't be bothered anymore. We played up to your need for pointless and excessive choice, but enough is enough. We know that whatever we do, chances are you aren't going to abandon the system, so let's just cut the crap, OK? You want to stuff an unending amount of fatty shit, oiled with the blood of the workers down your bullfrog throats, and we want to give it to you. We know you'll buy it anyway, so we're not even going to try and sell it in any creative manner anymore. Just fucking buy it, OK? JUST GO TO THE SHOPS, BUY ANYTHING YOU FUCKING WANT, FOR ANY STUPID FUCKING REASON WHATSOEVER AND WE"LL KEEP THOSE SHELVES STOCKED, YEAH? YEAH. GOOD.'

Finally, it seems, we understand each other.

How to hitchhike well

2010-02-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

We are no longer able to ride the Greyhound around the Rockies because, firstly, the bus is where all the psycho killers (think the killer in Psycho) go to do their psychotic killing. Don't believe me? Then believe the BBC here. I know I'm a tad prone to deception, but you can trust the beeb can't you... Or can you? Secondly, the Greyhound doesn't actually travel around here, and the Sun Dog bus (or was it the Sun O))) bus?) is well expensive.

So Dave, Paddie der German, und me, have been hitchhiking down from Jasper to Lake Louise. And it was piss easy. If you ever fancy doing it yourself, then print out and then memorise this handy how-to.

1. It seems that the more bags you have, the more willing people are to pick you up. So before we left Jasper, we made sure we had as many bags of shopping as possible, and arranged them on the roadside so that they covered a large expanse of ground. It's a bit like when you're confronted by an angry grizzly bear when you're trying to kidnap her cubs so you can sell them to a circus, and the bear gets well grouchy, you gotta make yourself look big - Canadian drivers fear very big things, and stop to give those big things lifts.

2. Vary the angle at which you hold your thumb out - this prevents DVT, and provides for an interesting game, as you try and predict which angle is most suited to which driver.

3. Throw people who didn't pick you up the middle finger. That'll teach 'em. It will also relieve stress, which is a must if you want your hitchhiking to be at its best.

4. Depending on the weather, and how good your legs are, dress like this:

Even if you are a guy, you will get picked up. However, you will then have to spend the journey refusing the driver's sexual advances. Nb. Do not accept baked goods from drivers in this situation, we have it on great authority that they all contain copious amounts of date-rape drugs.

5. In extreme situations, when the driver-uptake is dawdling along, forgo clothes altogether:

This technique is know as bumming a lift rather than thumbing for one. Amend your sign depending on your destination - we can't all be as carefree as this young lady.

6. Be patient. Especially in the Rockies, where there are few cars. You would think that people with big trucks would be the most likely to pick you up - they do not. They have small penises, and feel threatened by you. Therefor, thumb even the smallest car. Kind people have small cars.

7. DO NOT brandish weapons. Most people don't appreciate the extra protection your weapons will provide them.

8. Put your ipod on. Whenever I got mine out of my bag, we got picked up immediately. Drivers appreciate modern musical-storage technologies.

9. If you have a claw, hide it. The Claw scares people.

10. Smoke loads whilst waiting. Drivers love the welcome change that smokey hitchhikers make to that new car smell they paid the expensive valet for.

Reasons Why Banff Sucks

2010-02-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

Or, Reasons Why Jasper Rules

The hostel
Super expensive, no book case, no free food box in the kitchen (I started one though, with about a dozen bags of oatmeal), and full of the douchiest douches that ever did douche. The free bus-pass was a nice touch though.

The people
I don't know if they have their own website - Douchebook or something - but Banff is infested with snowdouches i.e. young Aussies and Brits who ski/snowboard and want EVERYONE to know how extreme they are. Their uniform is a basic one - inside, you HAVE to wear hats and sunglasses; wearing snowboard pants, preferably with your ass hanging out, is also neccessary for the casual, off-piste atmosphere. Walk around in flip-flops to be ultra-douche. The male douches try to out-douche each other by spending hours at a time quoting the same three lines from Flight of the Conchords - "I fucking love that show." Really? So does everyone else you knob - over and over again, broken up by Beavis and Butthead-esque moronic cackles. Watch Brian Butterfield, quote incessantly from that, and move yourself nearer to Enlightenment...
The female douches are no better. Let me quote some of them for you:

"I was gonna shave my legs, but then I hurt my back. It's like God doesn't want me to have sex this weekend!" - oh dear. I'm sure God, in His infinite wisdom, has more pressing matters than aiding some rough, fake-tanned chav's sexlife.
"We eat enough not to throw up, but not too much so that we can still get drunk after one drink" - said by three identikit chubby gap-year girls wearing too much make up - as Heather said, "less is definitely more" - who were trying to chat up some douche who looked like Chris Mandle. Nuff said. At the time they were stuffing their fat faces with perogies, but their plates had more ketchup than dumplings. Plus, don't worry - it's not how drunk you get, it's how drunk the bloke gets. and there's not enough booze in the world to make you three harpies seem attractive.

Throw in some surly Germans who ate enough food to shock even a fat bastard like myself, and an invisible roommate, and you can accurately conclude that the people of Banff are douches.

The town
Remember those Scooby Doo episodes where they would run away from the monster, and the background would just repeat itself? They should come to Banff - it's tacky tourist shop, expensive 'family' restaurant, douchey snow shop; tacky tourist shop, expensive 'family' restaurant, douchey snow shop; tacky tourist shop, expensive 'family' restaurant, douchey snow shop ad infinitum. It has no character. All the streetnames are named after animals - Marten Drive, Beaver Street etc. - and while living on Wolf Street would be fucking boss, it's clearly not an organic evolution, but some douchey marketing ploy by the tourist board.
The town itself not nearly isolated enough - Calgary-Banff is 90 minutes on the bus, while Edmonton-Jasper is 5 hours - and it's too built up to properly appreciate the beautiful landscape, which is more extreme than that of Jasper's gentler mountains. Banff is definitely a town that just happens to be in the Rockies, whereas Jasper is a place in the Rockies that also happens to be a town.

We iz writerz

2010-02-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

It started when Pip purchased two, not one but two jotters in a stationary shop. Being the delightful bundle of inquisitiveness that I am, I pondered 'Why does Pip need two jotters? What could he possibly write, with his clumsy child's handwriting, that would fill up two jotters?' Turns out that dear Coppers fancies himself as an author, and that the jotters plural were to contain his first novel.

Being slightly inclined to competition, we have jumped on the bandwagon, snatched Pip's idea out of his mitts, and have now come up with the competition:

'Whose short story sucks the least?'

We now have a fortnight of furious writing, or rather 13 days of kinda thinking up awesome plots involving zombies, collosal sea creatures, and lesbian private detectives, and one day of actually writing some literate shite about living in New York and gazing up into the sky, the sky, the sky. The page limit is 10 sides. Hopefully we'll get them up on here a.s.a.p. so all you parents can go 'Cor, the fruit of my loins is fackin intelligent', and all you friends (both of you) can go 'This is a crock of shit.'

We're going to Coachella

2010-02-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

Taking the general supposed readership of this blog into account, chances are that you're not. That makes us better people. Our children will be much more attractive for it. We will think thoughts of such philosophical worth that the ghosts of Descartes, Wittgenstein and Socrates himself will apparate into the Californian hills to discuss Beach House. The fact that we are going makes us so much more worthy of saving in 2012 that we've already got the flight programme for the shuttle. The only reason that we're not in the White House is because we don't have a dog as cute as that one what the Obambas (sic) have. We've just got Pip and THE CLAW.

But we're still going to Coachella. And you're probably not.

The Claw

2010-02-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

Whilst galivanting around in the Rockies, Heather slipped on a very naughty piece of ice (well actually we were tooling around on an ice rink in our hiking boots, but I'm trying to build up pathos here people), and, with the help of naughty gravity, broke her hand in a couple of places.

Being considerate boyses, we have given her numerous McDonald's-ketchup-sachet sized amounts of sypmathy, have said 'Poor Heath' lots, and have helped her do things like operate zippers and open beer bottles because one handed is not as easy as two handed.

However, copious mugs of tea and sympathy, for once, have not been adequate medical attention. Real doctorial assistance was required, and as none of us are trained orthopaedic people yet, we had to go to a hospital. The one in Jasper was very efficient at charging Heather over $700 for an x-ray and a bandage, but were not so hot when it came to giving us useful advice or actually treating the broken fingers. After a wee bit of umming and ahhing, Heath and faithful sidekick Pip (think of Donkey in Shrek) trecked it back to Edmonton, where they do hospitals properly. Apparently some well hot doctor yanked on Heath's fingers in a way that the dumbo GP in Jasper failed to think of, and put a proper cast on it. And they charged a hundred dollars less for the privillege.

Now Heather is back safe and sound in the bosom of our caring family, but she has a claw. Or rather, she has become The Claw. The Claw crushes beer cans with her bare claw, waves it menacingly at you and rips through the air inches from your face with it if you anger The Claw, does not take kindly to being called The Claw, and has, we think, murdered Heather. Probably utilising the claw.

Off to see the hand specialist (Dr. Shakespeare is his real fake name) in Bamff on Thursday, The Claw may undertake further mutation. If you want to send some sympathies to The Claw they'll be greatly appreciated. If you want to send us three boy heroes sympathies to replenish our stocks cus of all the ones we've dispensed on Heather, that would be champion too.

Pipisms #3

2010-02-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

Recently, a distinct sub-species of Pipism has come to light.

Whenever there's an argument in the group, Pippy is sure to be in the vicinity, polluting the airwaves with his vulgar yorkshire tongue. Unlike music however, where louder is most definitely gooder, Pip's protests seem to carry less and less weight as the decibel levels rise. In the end the inevitable happens, Pip loses and has to concede the point. However, such is the subtlety by which Pip expresses the act of 'conceding the point', so nuanced are his verbal tricks that it's taken us seven weeks to create the definitive compendium, the Pip-English phrase book, that we now make available to you all.

You are debating with Pip, you have won when he utters one of the following:

'Not Even'
'Whatever'
'Well, whatever'
'Je don't care'
'Je not give a shit'
'Well, no'
'Well, not really though'
'Shut your face'
'Shut your mouth'
'Ferme la bouche'
'Sorti la poubelle'
'Says you!'
Silence, then acting moody for about an hour
Shrug, then a pout, then acting moody for about an hour
Crossed arms
'Fuck you guys, I hate you so much, bunch of douches'

Guess who Dave saw whilst having a smoke outside a pizza place in Jasper...

2010-02-12T14:31:00.000-08:00

Harry Potter. Again.

We're thinking of just packing it all in and flying home. Canada clearly hates us.

The Wilderpiss

2010-02-10T13:09:00.001-08:00

Back in the days when I was a chubby youngster, not the lean machine of Mr Motivator-fitness I am now, I occasionaly used to partake of a family walk to divers pubs in the Surrey Hills, as one does. Often on these wooded, sometimes also hillocked walks, I would feel the need to relieve myself behind a tree. Don't be disgusted, it's only natural. Every time, without fail, my dad, noble Mike, would shout 'Watch out Alex, there's a group of girl guides coming down the path!' mid-way through my piss. For the first few occasions I would be startled, causing the stream of urine to snake dangerously close to my legs, and I would hurriedly finish off, not able to truly savour the delights of taking a slash on a carefully chosen tree or piece de shrub. Rushing back to dad pretending nothing potentially embarassing had occured, I would look around wildly for the aforementioned girl guides, always to be told 'You missed them -they've already walked off.'

Slowly it dawned on me that it was slightly fishy how everytime I went for a tinkle in the trees, girl guides would appear. Then it dawned on me - adults lie to youngsters to prevent them from truly basking in the joy you derive from whipping your John Thomas out and urinating onto Nature rather than an Armitage Shanks.

No longer has my outdoor micturating been spoiled though! In the Canadian Rockies, amongst the birds, the bees and the horned mamals, no girl scouts, mythical or actual, have disturbed me when I'm pointing the pink pistol. Here, at the top of a mountain, with vistas that are void of any signs that other humans are out there, with a gentle snow-chilled breeze wafting through, one can have the best wilderpiss available to man. The possible wilderpisses are so breathtaking that we have begun drinking gallons of orange juice (swiped from the free food section in the hostel) before setting off, and beer en route, to maximise our wilderpissing potential.

First we left our mobiles and laptops back in the UK. Then we learned not to become dependent on tv and the internet (sort of). Now we have learned how to truly urinate outdoors. Maybe this is a voyage of spiritual liberation after all...

Man Vs Nature: The Road To Victory

2010-02-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

Canada and hyperbole are fantastic bedfellows. In fact, they are the sole participants in an incredibly lewd bacchanalian passion. Everything is the biggest, the longest, the mostest bestest goodest. However, until we entered the Rockies this hadn't really applied to the wildlife.

The Rockies are too wildlife. They are the most wildlife. Big wildlife, wildlife with pointy bits all over. Wildlife that isn't the least bit afraid of people, that won't scamper off timidly into the undergrowth at your approach.
As we started our walk yesterday, we passed through a scenic valley, and we suddenly became aware that we had wandered almost into the very centre of a dissipated herd of elk that were grazing on the mossy forest floor. We were thrilled. The elk, less so.

Park safety boards contain one warning about bears, one about moose, one about cougars and TWO about elk. They suggest keeping at least 30m away from them at all times, not to infiltrate a group and NEVER to feed them. Displaying the classic arrogance of youth, we decided that the park officials almost certainly knew jack shit, and that elk amost certainly like crisps and being petted. 'I've got a Zoology degree, It'll be fine' I gallantly cried and we strode forward to get some good piccies.

At first, everything seemed fine, the Elk paid precisely zero attention to us, and we became bolder and bolder. Then, one looked up. 'It wants to be friends!' we exclaimed. The elk didn't want to be friends. As it moved towards us, it became very clear it was in an aggressive stance. Pip left a human-shaped dust cloud, Warner-Brothers style as he scampered into the trees, leaving us three heroic heroes in a terrifying face-off. And I mean terrifying. I'm not sure I've ever been so scared. Elk are bigger than stags, very obviously powerful and up close those antlers look like medieval instruments of torture, not the decorative wonders that all the nature programmes make them out to be. As we backed off, it sped up and all I could think was 'awww, we're actually gonna be gored. How boring. I cannot actually believe this'.

Luckily, me and Heather split off into the woods one way and Alex the other, and this seemed to confuse it (or whatever, look, I was crap at Zoology), and it halted the advance. As we crept back out of the herd through the bush, I could barely believe how lucky we were. We'd been maybe two metres away from a fully-grown, male elk that was pissed off with us shouting at it. The adrenaline was unreal.

Anyway, as we did survive, we resolved not to learn anything from the experience and continued the walk, poking around in log piles with long sticks, looking for bear dens. Cuddly teddies almost certainly wanted to share our beer and whiskey that we'd brought on a hazardous hike up a mountain!

Happy reading, parents!

HEALTH @ New City Suburbs, Edmonton - 6th Feb

2010-02-09T14:15:00.000-08:00

New City Suburbs is a weird place. It's some kind of goth bar, full of skeletons in dresses hanging from the ceiling, and every light is a UV one, which showed up a frightening number of white marks on my newly-bought pair of trousers...anyways, the doors didn't open till 9, so we went to an 'English' pub called the Sherlock Holmes. It was an experience I do not wish to remember. When we rocked up to the venue, the drinks were so expensive that we left again to head to the Jekyll & Hyde pub, which is in the basement of the GO! Hostel we had spent one night in a few days back. Pitchers were cheap, and the music was immense - some kind of weird covers band that had a Viz-reading Mark Lamarr on guitar, his dad or someone on keyboards, and an anonymous drummer. Anyways, when we went back to New City Suburbs a few hours and many pitchers later, the second support band were only just coming on. They were immensely shit. HEALTH more than made up for them though. All I remember is shouting 'Motherfucking HEALTH!' and moshing. Then somehow we were on a bus home, and then we were in a 24 hour McDonalds getting free burgers from a lovely little worker with a cheeky smile who Dave wanted to 'liberate'. All in all it was a boss evening.

Hostel Trolls - HI Winnipeg

2010-02-09T14:11:00.000-08:00

Guess which little shitbag followed us halfway across Candada so he could continue to offend us with his presence?

Harry Potter. The snivling piece de crap, the befriender of Nazis, the one, the only, the embarassment to all Britains who makes British football hooligans look like one of our best national exports. There he was again, speaking in his bluff-gruff voice and trying his damnedest to smoke convincingly. And who was that with him?

Yup, the Nazi guy who got really upset at the poker game in Ottowa when I asked if his strong aversion to hip hop was a colour thing. 'Were you at Ottowa?' he asked me, and 'Oh, I fort so' he oh-so-eloquently replied when I gave told him I indeed was. Intentionally dropped on his head as a baby I think. Not dropped from a great enough height if you ask me.

There is nobody I dislike in North America as much as I do these two.

'The young man and the lack of sea' or 'Davey Jones's land-locker' or 'Winnipeg and Edmonton are in the fucking middle of fucking nowhere'

2010-02-09T13:43:00.000-08:00

I admit that when my dear little pumpkin Pip suggested flying over Canada's obese midriff, I reacted a little swiftly. 'That cuts out the Canada bit of Canada!' I protested. Well, the Canada bit of Canada sucks ballz.

From the start of our epic bus journey from Burlington, Vermont until around 30 miles out of Jasper, the scenery was the same. I mean, exactly the same. For over 2500 miles. If you've ever played any old computer games where the graphics are kinda crappy and the background is just one flat plane of pixels that repeats itself, you'll understand what it was like. Thankfully, some of the journey was at night so I didn't feel the need to constantly look out of the window, lest I see something interesting (I never did), and my eyeballs got a chance to rehydrate.

It's even weirder when you consider that our own little isle, small enough to fit into Alberta alone 7 times (or summat), has an incredibly varied array of landscapes and terrain. It's to do with the sea (I assume), or in this case, the complete lack of it. I have never been farther from it, and in fact, I'm not sure it's possible to be that much further away from the big blue. Having never lived more than 20 minutes from the coast, I found the concept pretty alien and I'm more than willing to blame the problems of the hyper-dull Canadian centerpiece on the lack of something I consider 'mine', 'cos it's easy.

And the cities. The cities. Bleurghh. I saw nothing in the week or so that we were in Winnipeg and Edmonton to raise their status beyond that of 'pestilent carbuncle'. Endless strips of grey edifices, surrounded by endless grey plains. Everyone was ugly and smelly. Evil crows shat over any attempt at worthwhile architecture. Any shop opening that wasn't a Tim Horton's or a McDonalds was closed down by suited heavies. The weak cowered in terror at the cruelty of the strong.

Edmonton was especially bad. The guide book opens with this cracker of an advert for the place:

'There really is scant reason to visit Edmonton'

Brilliant. Always listen to your guide book, kids. Edmonton's major 'attraction' is that it contains the (former) largest mall in the world. I refused to go, but from what intel I can gather from my more intrepid travelling companions, If you took the rugby ball of unbridled capitalist greed and smashed through all seven spheres of hell, you'd get a rough feeling for the place.

So there it is, the mid-west. I wish could say more about them, but they really are as bland as endless, pointless prairies sound. In fact, I was losing faith in the whole trip after about 6 days in them. Thank god then that our voyage took us next to jasper, nestled in the heart of the magnificent rockies, which has had a distinctly reinvigorating effect.

Post to follow.

Playing the Jamaicans at dominoes

2010-02-09T13:21:00.000-08:00

Because it's in Mid West North America, there is absolutely nothing to do in Winnipeg except play games inside your warm hostel whilst wishing you were somewhere else (which we now are - the Rockies - and it's boss). And because repeatedly struggling through the 3 card games that any of us knows (cheat, poker and shithead) becomes draining upon your mental well-being very early on, I bought a $3 set of dominoes to vary the tedium. Leaving the shop, I made some joke about how as soon as we started playing we would be engulfed by Carribeans asking to join in, based upon the stereotype that all people from the Carribean love dominoes, and based in irony because when was the last time we had bumped into a Carribeaner freezing his tits off in the tundra wastelands that are middle-of-nowhere Canada?

So what happens? Within 'literaly' 5 minutes of playing, 3 Jamaican guys roll in, say 'Watcha playin? Dominoes?', teach us how to cook Jamaican 'dumplin' (ie dumplings), bamboozle us with the strongest patois we've heard since Disney's Cool Runnings, and then thrash us at dominoes. This highly embarassing lesson in how to lose at dominoes - a game that we naively thought was basically based on chance - kept on for much of the night. But that was ok. It turned out that these Jamaicans were well friendly and really funny - who'd have thought it?

The moral of the story? All stereotypes are true. Or something.

Wow, 7 bucks a pitcher! You can't go wrong there...

2010-02-05T15:13:00.000-08:00

It was a few days into our stay in the charming city of Burlington, Vermont, and, because our throats were feeling a wee bit parched, we decided to explore a couple of the local watering holes for some refreshment. The first bar we went to was some kind of a pizza place, where they served bland beer at bland prices, served by bland bar staff in an altogether bland setting. After a couple, we got bored and moved on.

To a place where a pitcher of Bud was only $7. Which is half what we're used to paying over here, so we would be fools not to really. We go in, get ID'd, get asked what our fruity accents are all about ('We're British you cretins') and finally get ourselves some sweet sweet Bud. A few sips into our beer, Pip is off to relieve himself in the gentlemen's watercloset, when two cops bust in, crying out 'We're looking for a white male!', and rush to the toilet where fair Pippin is currently evacuating himself. He wont tell us if he got touched up or not, but the fuzz didn't stay too long so they probably let him be, and then they were off out to continue scouring the predominantly white population for a white male. Strange things kept on appearing - later on in the night for example, a dozen pizzas appeared magically before us, and we were told to tuck in, it was free.

Then the barmaid, who had already achieved the level of pissedness that only the most foolhardy of students seek to achieve, comes over to us. As with every other over-friendly American we have met to date, she asks us the usual:

1) What are you guys, taking a break from college?

2) How long are you here for?

3) What do you think about America?

4) Do my fake titties make up for the fact that my arms and face are more wrinkly than your scrotums?

Then we get the full Jerry Springer edition of her backstory, how she has already been divorced twice, how she is still in the prime of her youth and looking for a new man (here she licks her lips at me, Pip and Dave in turn), and how she is really good at giving people relationship advice (slight doubts forming in our minds by this point). Then her nephew (where did he sprout from?) pipes in, asking us all about Europe:

1) How do you find the Spain?

2) Have you ever been to the Ibiza? I once went there...

3) Where's the best place to buy weed in the Europe?

Yes, he did utilise 'the' as a prefix for all parts of Europe, as if it were some section of a vast shopping mall: 'What did you do today Chad?' 'Well, I went to the mall, hung out in the food court, visited the little Italy where I got some real authentic Italian stuffed crust pizza just like they do in Pizza Hut, then I went for a Guinness in the Ireland...'

Man they can be patronising when they want to be these Americans.

But, to be fair, he was a friendly chap. Moments later he had whipped out his 'cell' and was showing us pictures of his girlfriend, naked, and his mistress, naked, who happened to be sat right next to us. She looked like an elf. (Maybe she was responsible for those pizzas...) She was barely 5 foot, was wearing a baseball cap that engulfed her head as a sombrero does a normal person, and had to hold her drink in two hands because it was too mighty for a one-hand-holding approach. Then the guy started telling us how he was trying to find a house where he, his girlfriend and his mistress could live happily. He assured us that this sort of thing is perfectly normal in America. I assure you it is not.

When he started offering us 'a go' on his mistress, still sat next to us, for '60 Euros', we knew it was time to leave. $7 a pitcher? There's always a catch somewhere isn't there...

6 minutes of us looking rough on a bus.

2010-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

It's true. We've been moaning about this journey for ages now, but here's proof that for most of it, we were pretty upbeat. In a strictly tragi-comic sense, of course.

Bus Etiquette

2010-02-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

Spending 41 hours on a coach has taught me a thing or two about bus etiquette, or maybe I should call them survival techniques. As with any public transport, the rules go; sit as far away from strangers as you can. Do not sit next to someone else unless you have no other choice. Unfortunately for us, many of our buses were jam-packed with people heading west into oblivion. When this is the case, you can maximise your comfort by following the lettered points below:

a) Carry a pillow with you, we got ours for $7 at TJ Maxx.

b) Get the window seat for the best views and optimum head rest/sleeping arrangement.

c) Don't sit in front of a tall person, every time they cross and un-cross their legs it will feel like they are punching you in the back.

d) Try to avoid buses with high quantities of the insane on-board. In particular, look out for obnoxious old French women who refuse to wait in line, take other people's seats and wander up and down the length of the coach at 2am brushing past seats and waking anyone who actually manages to get some shut eye.

e) If you have two seats to yourself, when the bus stops to pick up more weary travelers/serial killers/ clowns/ tramps, spread yourself out over the seats and pretend to be asleep. This ensures the seats are yours at least for a wee while longer.

f) Don't count on using the plugs on the bus to charge your iPod, beat the no-music-blues by just buying two more iPods to take on fully charged. And whilst your at it you might as well buy 3 laptops too. Unlimited films and music and you're sorted.

Hostel Trolls - Toronto

2010-01-31T15:02:00.000-08:00

I've got my iPod on shuffle, and up pops 'Jack The Ripper' by the Horrors - how very apt for this dissection of Toronto's hostel trolls. The dual reason will be come apparent soon. The most terrifying was Johnny, the eternal bachelor who looked like he was pregnant and who was a professional gambler - and obviously a very successful one, seeing as he could afford to spend four months in a youth hostel in Canada, scaring the wits out of hapless tourists who listened when he began one of his bi-hourly rants about Jack the Ripper. "I know who dun it!" he would scream, and because I happened to glance up from my book at that very moment, he latched on to me. He marched me to a computer to Google his number one suspect - George Hutchinson if you're arsed - and then he followed me to the kitchen to continue our 'conversation' - "he's the one, int he?" "Sure, whatever," I mumbled back, trying to get a glass of water in peace. Other gems he came out with includes :

"I've written to the FBI I have."
"I knew that the Yorkshire Ripper was a serial killer - I knew it!"
"My dad says I was special."

You don't fucking say.
Other trolls to inhabit the HI in Toronto (the best hostel we've been to so far, incidentally) included:

'English Mod' - this guy, who looked like a member of the Horrors (spooky, eh?), was apparently from London, despite having a German accent. He was an amazing artist though, so fair play
Jude - a prime example of the perennial traveller. She was of indeterminate age (somewhere between late 20s and early 40s), and English, but had spent so long travelling that she has completely lost her accent, and I thunked she was an Aussie. We ran into her again - albeit briefly - in a hostel in Boston.
Murphy - the creepy Irish guy who appeared for one night and one night only. He gave us some rum, came to a pub with us, and then disappeared with $20 of Dave's hard-earned cash. He was nowhere to be found the next morning, and no photos exist of this guy. Despite not existing, he still managed to get in a fight over the pool table which I had to defuse. Those crazy Irish!

Burlington's Top 10

2010-01-31T08:28:00.000-08:00

1. Muddy Waters

2. Muddy Water's ginger lemonade

3. Muddy Water's smoothies

4. The Crow Book Store

5. City Market treats (and the free tasters)

6. Watching 'The Butterfield Diet Plan' all the time

7. Crosswords over breakfast

8. Lolcat books in Urban Outfitters 'Somewhere, out there, Cheeseburger'

9. Seeing 'Champ' in the lake (their version of Nessie)

10. Watching Avatar AGAIN (N.B Life sucks when you're not big and blue).

And the top track:

The Montgomery 'Mini Mall' advert Soundtrack

"we got sofas, dinettes" etc etc, the dance to go with it is just classic.

What we are actually doing out here...

2010-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

No, we are not 'finding ourselves'. Why the heck would we want to do that? From the vague glimpses we've caught of ourselves, we didn't like what we saw.No, we're not travelling to expand our horizons. They will only retract at a later date, so why put ourselves through all that effort?

Yes, we are over here so that we can gather up an army of bears, train them to do our bidding so that we can live lives of opulent laziness, and somehow become rich off this. However, we're not in bear country yet, so, we've been biding our time by...

Watching shed loads of internet videos. Here are our favourites:

#5 Spot Popping Disclaimer: Do not watch if you are eating, have eaten, or are planning to eat today. Or if you eat in general. Certain people don't want this to be posted as it is so disgusting, and believe me it's pretty grim. However, our blog must be one of journalistic integrity and honesty. We shamefully admit we did watch this video, but only for about a minute.

#4 'Stop fricking betraying me' Bad parenting at its pinnacle. This spoilt little brat's tirade is pretty amusing, but then you start wondering about how spoilt and evil these two shits are, and you loose a little enthusiasm for humanity. There's many more in the series if you are as sad as us.

#3 'Kitchens, bedrooms, dinettes...' This is a real advert. I think Montgomery probably went out of business pretty soon after. I hope you enjoy his costume changes as much as I did.

#2 Mantage Very very amusing, fast-paced skit all about manliness in Northern American. In case you are wondering how we carry ourselves these days, we pretty much behave exactly as these strong-minded gentlemen. Even Heather has stretched her lumberjack muscles and helped chop down a Redwood.

#1 'The results have been increbidle' Brian Butterfield is our idol. We know this sketch back to front, quote it far too often, and bore everyone we meet with it. We have started to prepare some of the meals he lists, and so far 'potato grids' are the tastiest culinary treat.

So now click on the links, and go support your local Youtube.

Hostel Trolls - New York

2010-01-25T17:18:00.000-08:00

Now, we only stayed 2 nights at a hostel in New York, but such is our apparent magnetism for the frrrrrreaks on this trip, we managed to whittle a sorry little collection of repellent rejects from the woodwork.

First of all there was mangy bear, this unbelievably creepy Greek guy who was actually possibly some kind of Italian. Anyway, his body hair looked like he'd been in the hostel showers for months, picking the pubes and fluff out of the drain and sticking them to himself. This wouldn't have been a problem, no-one would have known, if he had just WORN SOME CLOTHES. Instead, he strutted around, thrusting his putrid, saggy y-fronts in the faces of all the other guest, while introducing himself in an accent that sounded like it had been cobbled together from Mario.bros games. A night time visit to the end of poor Pipkin's bed where he exclaimed to the sleeping chappy that, in his opinion at least, 'it's-a too-a fu-uh-ucking haat' and that 'I ne-e-ed a f-uh-ucking cigarette' sealed his place as one of the all time trolliest trolls.

Then there was shape-shifting black guy, who was possibly two people, we're not sure. We first became aware of him/them on our first morning, when, as he was still asleep, we crept around getting ready for the day and conversing in hushed tones. This apparently did not sit well with him, as he rolled over and exclaimed, in a voice loud enough to wake the remainder of the hostel 'Maan, fuck dat shit, yoos on vacation! Yoos don' have to whispa!' We thanked him, but continued to whisper, as, being the whitest people alive, we were terrified. I pointed out later that basically this makes us racists, but whatever. The next morning however, mr.man had metamorphosed into a eye-patched dude who scowled even in his sleep. The only clue we had that these people were related was their shared tendency to hug their possessions in their sleep. We assumed there was some sort of pupua stage during the night, but as we stuffing our faces at McDonalds and shouting at each other at the time, I guess we missed it.

Pipisms #2

2010-01-24T16:57:00.000-08:00

Hot off the press folks, come get yourself gems from the potty-mouthed oracle:

1. 'If you eat a whole pack of mints, you shit yourself.' Yeah, but not really though...

2. 'I give my life to the fat.' It's 3 in the morning, we're in a strange McDonalds somewhere in New York, and Heather tells Pip he's fat or something cus he's shoving a bigun' down his throat, and he replies with this retort.

3. 'So, er, what does the 'Champagne of Beers' taste like?' Referring to a slogan on a beer bottle some boss-hot American chick is sipping delicately from, Pip attempts to kick-start the sweet talk with this smooth-criminal entree. She didn't even bother replying (what could she say? 'Er, it tastes of beer?'), but just gave him a withering look and went off to find a more erudite chap to chat shit with.

Boston's Top 10

2010-01-24T16:00:00.000-08:00

1. The Otherside bar x3

2. Clam chowder at NoName restaurant

3. Following lines of bricks

4. 25 cent sweets

5. Hearing our voices echo inside the Mapparium

6. Late night coffee

7. Sour Patch Kids

8. Pretending we go to Harvard

9. Nearly getting instruments

10. Thinking of the best 'Now' CDs eras.

And the top tracks:

1. OPM - 'Heaven Is A Halfpipe'

2. Spin Doctors - 'Two Princes'

For ages it was "that song that goes duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh".

No One Gives A Shit About...David Blaine

2010-01-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

Seriously. We ran across him in New York, in Times Square, with some henchmen, collecting money for Haiti. A very valid cause of course, but why the hell wasn't he doing anything himself? He was just stood behind a security barrier looking smug, while his cronies went around intimidating the crowd, roughing people up for their pennies. One guy even picked up a seven year old kid, hung her from her ankles, and shook her until money fell like rain into his bucket. Another reason that David Blaine sucks is that he wouldn't do any magic tricks for us; he's a magician for fucks sakes! We weren't asking for him to set himself on fire or eat his own face or anything. David Blaine is such a douche and I hate him.

Hostel Trolls - Ottawa

2010-01-23T16:47:00.000-08:00

So I've been terming the assortment of weirdos and social retards that we have come across as 'hostel trolls'. Trolls because most of them are either pig-ugly, smell of stale cheese, sleep all the time, grunt as a means of conversing, carry clubs around, and sacrifice to the gods, after having ravaged, virgin maidens from the surrounding lowlands. As when you pull back the bark on a rotting tree and find it teaming with woodlice and various creepy-crawlies, a stay in most hostels will result in us uncovering something we didn't really care to uncover in the first place.

Ottawa then. This rest stop was a bit 'Hosteling for Dummies' in that it was a bad-trip concoction of terrible hostel stereotypes: fat Aussie slag, douchebag immature Brit, over-friendly old Asian man, why-has-he-not-done-anything-with-his-life old surf bum, and creepy hostel worker who is so infatuated with the hostel, that he would stick his penis in it if it were some kind of a mammal rather than a building.

The fat Aussie slag, I don't think her poor parents bothered to name her, was in a horrific physical state. Cellulite, acne, bed sores and hitherto-undiscovered skin diseases covered her vulgar vissage; her numerable bellies continued to wobble here and there for minutes after she herself had stopped moving; and, when she let loose an Aussie cackle, neck fat vibrated the air around her, emanating a disconcerting humming noise. The means she had employed to achieve this state was suggested to me when she polished off a mini-me sized keg of Heineken in the 45 minutes I could actually stand in her company. Wolfed it down, the fat bitch.

And then there was Harry Potter, some specky four-eyed twat from Bristol I think it was, who thought he was the dog's bollocks because he had chubby arms which sort of kinda looked like muscles if you squinted at them. He spoke with the loud, boisterous voice of a guy who has a very small member and only a handful of brain cells, but thinks that if he guffaws like Denis the Menace everyone will think he's a 'cool guy'. Nobody thought he was a cool guy. He said that he had come to Canada so he could practice his French. Nobody actually speaks French in Canada apart from one miserable bitch on the Montreal metro system, and certainly not in Ottawa, which is part of ENGLISH SPEAKING Canada. Just in case this isn't coming across, I didn't like him.

Over-friendly old Asian man, who we nicknamed Ghandi because Ghandi was also a friendly old Asian man, seems to have made the hostel his home. So had why-has-he-not-done-anything-with-his-life old surf bum. So had Harry Douchebag and Fat Fuck Bitch in fact. Come to think of it, we were the only people who seemed to have acquired the ability to enter and leave the hostel, and Ottawa, at will. Ghandi liked to read a lot. Surf Fail liked to advise people on 'awesome' places to go visit, but which actually turned out to be beyond awful (see my post on Niagara Falls).

The ironically entitled 'Freeman' works at the hostel, lives at the hostel, never leaves the hostel, licks the hostel, sniffs the carpets when nobody is watching, and collects the stories of hostel guests because he has none of his own. He kinda made my skin creep.

Burger Blog #7- Border Cafe Cajun Burger.

2010-01-20T19:19:00.001-08:00

Heather:

This is my first burger blog - the reason being, normally, I don't care enough to write about burgers. And actually, this post isn't really about the burger (as average as it was) but about how disgusting we are starting to feel after seeing the level of food consumed and thrown away each day. For this reason, Dave and I have started to share meals, and we didn't get anywhere near finishing the pile of chips that came with Mr. Cajun burger. No Sir-ee.

With this meal, each of us got a soft drink which came with free re-fills. And by re-fills the restaurant meant "don'tevenfinishyourdrinkandwe'llsnatchitfromyourtableandplaceanevenfullercolderfresheroneinit'splace". I had barely touched 3 glasses of the stuff before our waiter decided I simply must need a new one, God forbid I should sip from a nearly empty glass!

We left feeling ill, and relieved that, the burgers at least didn't work on a re-fill basis.

Dave:

This isn't food. This isn't food at all. You can't just pile loads of shit on top of loads of fuck and call it food. This aberration, this repellent pustule made me feel morally depraved (the waste, oh the waste! then later, guilt- I have no right to be hungry again! ever!) and physically sick just from looking at the groaning mass of consumable trash on the table. This was a fucking meal between two! I couldn't finish half a meal! Nobody could!
Looking around in disgust, I couldn't understand it. Nobody else seemed to think it weird that instead of bread sticks or some other cardboard stomach primer, we were given a refillable basket of re-fried nachos with salsa. Why weren't they saying something? Like, 'No thank you, I have no need for you to fry my crisps before you bring them to me, because the crisp, you see, takes its name from that fact it is crispy, a delightful little side-effect of the cooking process'. But the staff insist; 'I'm so sorry sir, but you've finished one basket, with difficulty, between four? You were just worrying that it might have been an oversight to eat so much before any of your food had come? company policy I'm afraid, do gorge on another.'

Well FUCK YOU! I don't want any more food! No more fucking food! Leave me alone! This burger contains about 2 herds of cows, plus all the cheese they could produce before someone send a piece of metal flying into their temple. Do you hear me? I DON'T WANT SO MUCH FOOD! look at me! I'm not wasting away! It would actually help your business not to tromp through ingredients so fast! Just leave me alone! Wadaya mean have I finished my drink? No, of course I Cunting haven't! It's half full! It does NOT need a refil!

Vomit everywhere. I have never felt so repugnant in a restaurant in my entire life. Afterwards, I wanted to weep and retch in equal measure.

-100 million baz-billion Ronalds.

American Idle

2010-01-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

{I've attempted to write this article a few times now, and, although I'm trying my damndest not to sound like I'm just laughing at homeless people in America, every time I start listing certain characters we've come across, it just sounds like... well, like I'm laughing at them. Let's try again, and see if I can kick-start my human decency.}

Homelessness seems to be quite a big problem over here, much bigger than back in Blighty, and there doesn't seem to be the same infrastructures of help and charity which we have to help the homless back home, eg The Big Issue. {That's an alright start, a bit clunky, but at least I haven't cracked a joke yet} This came as a slight surprise to me - when you think 'America', you think of rich jerks driving Hummers and the whole celebrity culture thing, not people struggling to keep their heads above the water. But then again, as the current free health care debate reminds us, this is often a country of have and have nots, where the haves don't want to play nice and share.

The streets are so full of homeless people that it actually becomes somewhat of a competition for them to actually earn some money, and so they have come up with trademark blurbs that they bandy around the streets to prospective patrons. In the UK we have 'Can you spare some change for the homeless mate?', over here you get 'Can anyone contribute to the funds of a delinquent minor?' from a 50 year old guy, and 'Can you gimme a dollar, I need to get really drunk tonight.' from some loon on the subway.

Humour as a means to differentiate becomes a big part of their sell: Whilst walking towards Strand Second Hand Books some place in Manhattan, a homeless man shouted out 'Can anyone spare me a hundred bucks? I need it for my holiday home in Hawaii.' Refusing to give up when passersby ignored his fair-enough request, this audacious fellow broke into 'Like a Virgin' by Madonna. The voice he blasted into his walking cane was not the most exquisite I've ever heard, but the vibrant energy he displayed would have gotten a standing ovation even from sour-puss Simon Cowell.

And then there was the homeless guy in Toronto, stretched out in a sleeping bag, right across a dip in the pavement where pedestrians were supposed to enter a zebra crossing, eating a large pizza and sipping nonchalantly from a Pepsi bottle. His was the complete don't-give-a-fuck attitude of someone happy to thrust his homelessness at the middle class financiers on their way to work. An interesting take on 'The American Dream' or something.

New York's Top 10

2010-01-20T14:51:00.000-08:00

(In no particular order, sorry the general trend for top 10 lists is food. What can I say we love it maybe a little too much).

1. The underwater creatures section at The Natural History Museum

2. Brunch menus going on 'til 4pm

3. Thinking up our 'Daemon' animals (Sloth, Badger, BlueJay and unknown - guess who has what)

4. Making the best salad

5. Herschey's hats

6. The free ferry

7. The sunshine!

8. YouTube DJ sets

9. Cheesecake

10. A morning stroll in Central Park

And the key track:

DJ Mehdi - Pocket Piano (Joakin Remix)
Re-hearing a classic Newcy kitchen tune during our 'famous' NY set was top.

Burger Blog #6 - Brgr Burger

2010-01-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

Walking from Union Square to Times Square, we came across a place called Brgr, and stopped there briefly for two reasons - partly because missing out vwls is wll scnstr and partly because they serve the best shakes in New York according to the New Yorker. The shakes were extremely lush - Heather's blueberry & pomegranate being the hands-down winner in my eyes - but whether that is the best that the city that never sleeps has to offer is another matter. Unsurprisingly, Brgr also sells burgers, but because it is one of those hip New York establishments that has morals and shit (boring!), they are all made with 100% grass-fed cows that have led a happy life - before being shot in the face, chopped up, and eaten, of course. While Bowell scarpered off for one of his bi-daily shits, we decided to play a little lolz on him - when he returned, we told him that I had ordered one of the hippie burgers and would have to wait for a while for it to be grilled, bunned, and manged. However, we got so involved in the trick that we couldn't actually remember whether or not we had really ordered a burger, and it took a good 20 minutes for the spell to be broken i.e. me looking at my receipt and then us laughing in Bowell's face. This mystical meta-burger manages to score ∞ Ronalds.

Burger Blog #5 - Neil's Famous Burger

2010-01-17T18:04:00.000-08:00

I have been looking forward to a proper New York diner for a long time, and when we stumbled upon Neil's Deli one day, all my wishes and more came true. It was one of those tiny little corner places that was far too busy, but which ran as smoothly as the grape jelly they offered, due in part to the fact that it was clearly a family-run joint. Everything on the menu looked and smelled amazing, but his Famous Burger was just too tempting. It was simple and effective - unbelievably succulent patty combined with a lightly-toasted bun, and a basic salad of lettuce and tomato, topped with a slice of American cheese. It was good but it wasn't great, and the fries let it down a bit as well, meaning Neil only scored 7 Ronalds.

Uncle Sam's chicks: an American approach to ornithology.

2010-01-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

Frankly, the zoological worth of our trip so far has been far less than the Hemmingway-esque 'riding around on bears, hunting moose' response most of us gave when we were asked what we were going to be doing in Canada. Sure, the squirrels are fatter and darker, and some of the assorted waterfowl on the islands off Toronto were pretty, but borderline vermin make for a swashbuckling adventure tale not.

Actually, neither does what I'm about to go into, but it is slightly more interesting than fat tree rats and ducks. Strolling through central park on our first morn in New York, we entered the 'environmentally important' area. Now, my experience of this kind of place is not good. Marking off a small section within a public space and calling it the 'nature zone' usually does little more than allow little jimmy to contract bubonic growths when he tries to share his mini-milk with the 'big hamster'. But this place was a world away from that; as soon as we walked in, we found ourselves surrounded by a multitude of little tweeties. And not just any old pigeons, these were the A-Z of American Aves; Blue Jays, Cardinals, American Robins, you name it. Such was the overt patriotism displayed by our feathered friends of freedom, that it was hard not to wonder if the place had actually been stocked by Uncle Sam himself, the sole purpose of which being to impress upon visiting folk the fact that mother nature herself fights the good fight alongside the U.S of A.

Probably though, these birds became symbols because of their visibility in accessible areas. they came to represent American life because they were, in fact, an everyday part of American life. Hella boring explanation though.

Suck My Balls Niagara Falls

2010-01-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

Don't go. It sucks balls.

If you have ever been curious as to what Niagara Falls is like, then just plug up all the sinks and basins on the top floor of your house, whack the taps on full blast, go out for the day, and come back to waterfalls cascading down the stairs. Trust me - this is good advice. You will have more fun clearing up the sodden remains of your treasured-but-now-completely-ruined possessions than you will visiting this wonder of the world.

Niagara Falls, the town on the Canadian side of the river, is hauntingly capitalist. You go up the main street, and are assaulted from all sides by flashing neon, massive sleazy Frankensteins manhandling burgers, Draculas offering you a frightful experience (believe me Count, I'm already having one!), and everything else you can imagine that has no connection with the love affair between H2O and gravity that was the real reason you came here. I was horrified at the state the town had driven itself into - there was no soul, there was no humanity, there was nothing of any saving grace in fact.

'Why the hell have we come, and how soon can we get out of here?' our heros cried as they stumbled into a Tim Horton's for a fine coffee, soup and sandwich combo, the highlight of our day. 'Oh yeah, the waterfall.'

The waterfall itself is, honestly, nothing special. It's big, yeah. And it's loud. And there's lots of water going everywhere. To give credit where it's due, it probably does achieve 10 out of 10 for waterfallyness. But after 5 mins of going 'Phoar, that's big. And loud. It certainly IS the most waterfall I ever saw...' we got bored and started throwing snow around and fighting with wopping great big icicles that had been growing nearby.

Not even the dead friendly couple in a local's bar (with a boss amount of Va Halen on the jukebox), who bought us beer 'in the name of the Commonwealth' (what's that?), would drag us back.

Actually posted by Bowell. Not Hootface.

Toronto's Top 10

2010-01-12T19:15:00.000-08:00

1. The Vietnamese food place we found

2. The first Tim Horton's donut

3. 'Quiet nights in'

4. Toronto Islands (see 5, 6 & 7)

5. Walking along frozen rivers

6. Having the pier to ourselves

7. Finding abandoned horses

8. Realising we were in a band

9. Hanging out with other bands

10. The thrift stores.

And the top track:

Moth Dust - 'Various Side Projects'.
We're shit but we know it.

It's time for a DETOX

2010-01-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

So, the lovely islands of Toronto and the vast spaces we can feel within our reach are helping cleanse our souls, yet our bodies are crying out for help. Too much junk food is making Heather an un-happy bunny. So it has been decided, all four of us are to go on a ma-hussive detox.

The rules: no junk food at all for the next week (i plan on this continuing for a while longer but hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves). No Wendy's, no MacDo's, No schwarma, no chips. NO NO NO.

I am sure our heads will become clearer, our poos worthy of inspection by Gillian McKeith and our muscles ready for skiing, climbing and dancing. So yeah, watch this space. Will we do it?

Space: The Final Frontier Mentality

2010-01-11T20:04:00.000-08:00

The problem with our green-souled reliance on public transport is that the wild, or basically anywhere that isn't some sprawling metropolice, is incredibly difficult to reach. One of my favourite Canadian moments so far was the service station that we stopped at as our Greyhound crawled its way from Ottowa to Toronto. Honestly, if the Early Learning Centre was ever to produce a 'my first Canadian hamlet playset', they needn't look further from that little place. Log cabin, frozen river complete with criss-crossed animal tracks, wood pile and a little shop that sold nothing much but Hersheys and Marlboros.

Another thing it gave me was a sense of the almost unimaginable vastness of Canada. It's a paradox of city-hopping that, although you're constantly moving between 'big' places, the real space, where you feel dwarfed, lies, err, in the space in between. It's a weird feeling, one that's practically unobtainable in England. The few areas of 'wilderness' that we call our own; Dartmoor, the Highlands, some parts of Yorkshire, really are that in name only. You're never more than a days walk from some major population centre. Here, the emptiness unfolds, to all intents and purposes, endlessly. It's great. Even though I was well aware that it existed, it's nice to know for sure that such an old-fashioned state of being still exists.

The second time I've felt this sense of the 'real' Canada, and by 'real' I mean my romanticized ideal of what I want it to be like, was on the Torontion (?) islands. Originally built upon by rich and sweaty city-dwellers, constructing summer homes to escape the urban heat, many of the houses became inhabited year-round as Toronto's post-war housing crisis took hold. In subsequent years, many of the structures were demolished by the authorities in an attempt to create a miniature national park. Nowadays, only two of the original buildings remain. One's a tea shoppe, and the other one I can't remember, as I stopped reading half way through that sentence on the island info board. The islands are pretty amazing, on the shores of lake Ontario, which to those unversed in the ways of the great lakes looks very much like the sea. The only difference being that it contains no salt, and so doesn't melt the snow or ice off the rocks and sand of the shoreline. This looks far odder than it sounds and I found myslef staring at the scene for ages, tryng to work out what was out of place.
Not being kitted out for tourists in the winter, we found we pretty much had the whole place to ourselves, and walking around on the river (don't worry mummy, the ice was over a foot thick) between the islands you could almost imagine yourself trekking though some piece of untouched forest. Then the CN tower appears over the treeline and you look down to see a crisp packet, imprisoned 6 inches below the surface. FML.

"If you buy me a bag of chips I'll pull you"

2010-01-10T20:56:00.000-08:00

Don't you just love how "quiet nights in" always end up as epic nights out? Last night we thought we'd buy a few beers, cook a nice stir-fry, and go to bed early after a long day of touristy-type activities i.e. the CN Tower, which costs lots of money for pretty much nothing, but still counts as one of those "must-do" activities that guidebook writers get in a massive circle jerk over. Drinking in our hostel while watching a couple of movies, we started making drinking games, which ended badly. They were:

Just Married - drink continuously whenever Brittany Murphy is on screen, and when she is out-of-shot scream "RIP!" at her pretty dead face.

Die Hard - one finger for every bad 80s haircut, one for gunshots or car crashes, two for explosions, and one every time Brucey gets a smear of oil or blood on his pristine white vest.

Probably some more as well but they have been lost forever in the haze that was the Dog's Bollocks. Awesome name for a pub, and one which lived up to its name. Memories are highly fragmented, but the night goes something like this - get taxi to pub; buy lots of cheap pitchers of some disgusting beer; drink said pitchers very quickly; pay for several games of pool; never actually play pool cos I was too drunk; try and fail to chat up two hot Canadian girls by declaring "But I'm English!"; meet Win Butler from the Arcade Fire; get a lush shawarma from a take-away called Ali Baba's; spend the rest of the walk home declaring my love for said shawarma; get home at some ungodly hour and crawl into bed; wake up at some ungodly hour (i.e. before noon) with a mouth drier than the Sahara. Well worth it though, off to do it all again now!

Pipisms, round-up #1

2010-01-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

Every so often, our esteemed travelling colleage Pipkin will adopt a stance of authority, wag his finger in the manner of an exasperated tutor, and spew forth proverbs of such wisdom that it leaves the assembled masses stunned, and wide-eyed with admiration.

On order vs. Chaos:
'Rules are what make life fun but rules are made to be broken'

On agriculture:
Pip: Alex, you should support farmers' markets.
Alex: I do Pip, you know that, we go all the time.
Pip: I don't need to, because every time I look out of my window, there are 4 pheasants in my garden

On the role of the consumer:
'People who go into burger shops and don't buy burgers are just wrong'

On the sight of unparalelled splendour from the top of the CN tower:
'Hmmm, It is a wonderful view. But it's not a beautiful view.'

Burger Blog #4 - The Baconator

2010-01-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

Would you believe me if I told you that there's only one obese man in Toronto? Well it's true, and he resides in Wendy's, and, like small reef fishes, never moves far from this spot. By the looks of things he never needs to strain himself and actually order a food - a waitress just periodically brings him chips and a CN Tower sized pattie-and-bacon combo - and the balance of the universe is left undisturbed. Even if Wendy's did allow him to get up off his gargantuan backside and reconsider his life choices, his heart would have something to say on the matter. Fat bastard.

This is the most disgusting burger I've eaten, and likewise the most disgusting burger 'joint' I have visited, in a long while. Hang your head in shame, 'Wendy'. Firstly, Wendy's itself is depressing, archaic, frequented by loonies with unnaturally high pitched voices, too brown-and-beige-walled, rough, expensive, and no match for FatDonalds. Entering it is like dreaming 'that' bad dream you used to have repeatedly as a child in which you turned up to school wearing no clothes, everyone laughed at you when you called the teacher 'Mum', and then a sinister clown who smelled of urine started stroking your genitals, repeating the mantra 'Biffo likes them young and naked'.

The burger pattie itself is square. No animal is square, right angles don't appear in Nature, and all cows are circular. As far as I can tell, it contains no meat.

The burger bun was ok actually - it had some seeds on it which didn't look too offensive. However, the whole contraption appears in some sort of a space-age foil wrapper, a bit like what a marathon runner dons after they've crossed the finish line, to 'contain the disgusting'. Don't try and con me Wendy you ginger bitch, I can tell that this burger is rancid.

Soft drinks and chips are not served in packets or cups, they are served in gallon buckets that are more apt for serving farmyard animals. Why not just be honest with your clientele, and give them a fucking trough?

This burger made me feel physically ill for 24 hours. The excrement that left my body, quite hasitly I may add, was the colour of evil.

Things that we said during the meal: Me: 'I'm not even hungry, why am I eating this?' Dave: 'I'm not enjoying this'. Pip: 'My heart hurts'.

1/10 Ronalds

"Are you guys in a band?"

2010-01-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

There's something about the people in Toronto, something that makes them think Pip, Dave, Alex and myself, our motley crew form some sort of a band. We had barely stepped through the Toronto hostel doors when the receptionist asked us the question, followed by her friend later on in the evening and some other guys in the common room that night, all entirely stand alone situations i swear!

Maybe it's the fact at least 75% of us wear plaid at all times. Maybe it's the three guys one girl combo. Or maybe it's because we are all fucking cool and extremely musically talented. Whatever it is, we're starting to get used to the idea. Despite the fact that the only instrument we brought with us is my shiny new harmonica, thoughts of triangles, guitars and ukeleles sprung into our heads. YES. We're the cool band traveller types (instruments being shipped to loaction as we speak obv) and our name is....?

No Pip we are not going to be called 'Moth Dust', and I'm not going to even mention the other suggestions on here you howwid boys. So, it's up to you readers (well I say that but actually if you don't suggest anything good then it's just gonna have to be 'Moth Dust'). But please suggestions will be appreciated! And then next time we get asked "You guys in a band?" we will be prepared to let the charade begin.

Tipping

2010-01-09T17:14:00.001-08:00

So, like, in the UK you tip 10% ONLY IF your waitress has a massive rack, or if they delivered your food so fast that you hadn't even finished ordering it. If they were fugly, or you actually grew noticeable stubble in the period waiting your nosh, then you gave them a deliciously sweet F.A. Standard.

Over here, you tip everyone. You tip a bar person 10% for the tasking effort it takes to pour one pint of beers please. If you don't, the aforementioned bar person comes and hunts you down and says 'Why didn't you tip me man, it's my livelihood...' You tip a homeless guy cus he wished you a happy new year a week after New Years day. You tip the lass who bought you the food that it was her job to bring you. And it's very hard to actually tip successfuly. The other day we accidentaly tipped 20 bucks in a restaurant because we forgot to ask for change. Last night Pip tipped 5 bucks to a guy in a kebab shack, and Dave 9 bucks for a pitcher of beer. Such ineptitudes and ditherings, which seem to be the main causes for our outrageous tipping errors, are going to make us bankrupt before we even hit America. And to make matters worse, we've realised that when we need to actually grow up and get jobs to support our decadence, we're not going to be able to get bar jobs as planned as a last resort means of employment, custhey're in high demand due to the tipping thing.

It takes getting used to. So, in order to become properly Canadian, we've start to tip each other 'for practise'. Or basically for boss jokes which produce girlish giggles of delight. Which at the current rate is every five minutes.

Playing the Nazis at Poker

2010-01-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

Errrrrrrr, what? Yeah, exactly.

We took the bus from Paris to London, or so it seemed. We left Montreal behind and arrived in Ottawa, the nation's capital. London cus their Houses of Parliament are basically a carbon copy of our Houses of Parliament, but surrounded by 'po po' in their 'prowlers' rather than our 'bobbies' in 'high vis jackets'. Also, later that evening, I got called a 'wigger' for refering to them as 'Po Po', but I get ahead of myself. After a delightful stroll around the city, whose skyline was a smorgasbord of wannabee European architecture (but done well, with twinkly fairy lights, and interspersed with Subway and fatDonalds), we trudged back to the hostel, via the government liqour store.

Sipping Boris, a nice french beer with some sort of a bullshit ethos about being young and unhindered by society's shackles, I started chatting to some of the hostel trolls, and got myself into a game of poker. Things started alright - I had my poker recline sorted (see pic), I fiddled with my stack of chips like the pros do, and I even won a decently proportioned pot - my straight beat some South African pilot's 2 pair. In short, I was holding my own. Then someone requested a song, and another said 'As long as it's not fucking hip hop, I'll play it...'

And it clicked. A few minutes before, a friend had told us that there was a bona fide Nazi, complete with Swastika tattoo, staying at the hostel. It had to be either the Canadian skinhead or his English counterpart. Being a sensible chap, and one prone to clear up all the facts and decipher which cunt was the bigger cunt, I thought that the line 'What's your beef with Hip Hop, is it a colour thing?' was the best way to proceed.

They didn't actually appreciate that one...

None of us slept well that night, because we were all pretty fearful of being shanked whilst we snoozed. Needless to say, we were mega desperate to get-the-fuck out of Ottawa Backpackers Inn, or whatever the asylum was called, as quick as poss.

You learn things when you travel hey, and I learned that you don't play Nazis at Poker. Even if the stakes are low.

Food, Glorious Food

2010-01-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

North Americans in general take the same level of interest in food as a society that fat Europeans do as individuals. Although, ostensibly, it takes up a large portion of their conscious lives, they're not actually the least bit interested in it. Yes, acquiring vast, steaming amounts of it is important to them, but that's really as far as it goes; they're not concerned with what it is, how it was made, where it comes from, just that it be plentiful and readily available.
I was shocked by the stark admission of this by America when I visited a few years ago, and thought, as I'd told the anecdote to anyone who'd listen, that I'd be ready for the delicious sensory assault when I returned. I was dead, dead wrong.

Case in point, the tag-line for a fairly skanky sandwich chain found in underground stations: 'The only limit is your imagination'. Errrrr, it's a fucking sandwich, some bread, ham and maybe a little bit of lettuce, not a opportunity to revise your life mantra. It's the kind of sensationalisation of food that eventually stops it becoming food at all. All of this also comes in vomit-inducing quantities. A 'meal' at McDonalds, which in the UK or Europe comes with drink, burger and fries includes TWO burgers here. As standard. That's just how it is. With your meal, you expect to get TWO burgers. One drink, one fries and TWO burgers. Dontgetit.

The problem with all of this of course, is that I'm on a high, high horse of hypocrisy. All this food is so so yummy, and we eat it all the time. Fast food, while at home cheaper than most, is still more expensive than going to the supermarket. Here, they give it away like snow. Conversely, grocery shopping is practically prohibitively expensive. Most of the time. One of the oddest differences between Canada and Blighty that I've noticed so far is the, to my European brain, the seemingly arbitary pricing of certain groceries. So, when I bought three oranges, it cost me $3, but a big steak was $1.62. What? Actually, there seems to be a meat surplus in Canada, it's the only thing you can get, food-wise, from shops that's reasonable priced. 40 slices of bacon came in at $2. me and heather bought some tomatoes to go with it, for $4.39. Whatever.

Burger Blog #3 - C'est What? Bison Burger

2010-01-08T13:09:00.000-08:00

An upmarket burger for our first night in Toronto, from a superbly-named little pub/restaurant called C'Est What?, which was remarkably cavernous and stacked full of delicous ales. The Bison Burger was, despite its name, a succulent beef burger, which came on a lightly-toasted bun, accompanied by a simple fresh salad and surprisingly tasty BBQ sauce. A generous helping of herbed-frites completed the meal, which scores a very healthy 9 Ronalds. Photo to follow.

Ottawa Gig Guide

2010-01-07T20:34:00.000-08:00

Yep, absolutely nothing planned. Best. City. Ever!

Montreal's Top 10

2010-01-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

(In no particular order)

1. Ice-skating in park Mont Royal

2. Trying the Poutine (aka le Poo-tine)

3. Snow covered arm chairs and bikes

4. Mine and Dave's fruit binge

5. Whisky and wine

6. Cheap steak

7. Hi-jacking each and every i-pod dock we set eyes upon

8. Karaoke x2

9. Drinking from Jars

10. Meeting new international pals and sharing a beer (or 10).

And the key tracks:

1. System of a Down - Chop Suey

An unlikely karaoke choice from the bar manager on NYE. Boss.

2. The XX - Crystalized

We played it loads, then got overkill when we heard them played out loads too. Nevertheless, this track will remind me of Montreal.

Poutine

2010-01-06T13:34:00.000-08:00

So the national dish of Quebec is poutine, which is basically cheesy chips with gravy i.e. standard drunken student night-out fare back in England. It looks rough but tastes delicious; they use this weird rubbery cheese that tastes yummy like cottage cheese. I had the T-Rex, which came with four kinds of meat; Bowell chose the Dan-Dan, which was sausage, bacon & onion; Dave went for the Mart, which was sausage, bacon & mushroom; Heather, being adventerous as ever, selected the plain old original. Everyone had an amazing time, apart from me, who got the runs from it. Having to run from the metro to Sadie's house to use the bathroom was not fun; neither was spending half-an-hour on the shitter. Bon fucking appetit.

Notes from a small island #1

2010-01-05T18:48:00.000-08:00

Yo. I have joined my scounting pary in snowy Montreal - they have scouted the city out so well for me that they have in fact exhausted every inch of it, and we're off to Ottawa tomorrow morning for the excitingly-named 'Peace Keeping Museum'. But I know you guys have been worrying muchly about my safety and that, so I thought I'd post a few key moments of my tadpole-sized journey so far.

1. When you travel with British Airways, you are paying for one thing. Botox for the haggard hostesses that BA opt for. Even rougher than Easyjet cabin crew, who are required to match their skin tone to the company's trademark orange. Why is it that when airlines such as Singapore Airlines are delivering the goods, BA are constantly delivering the bads?

2. Pip's a moron. In arguing that we should all support farmers markets (remember, Pip is number one Burger King and Fatdonalds face-stuffer), he then proceeded to state that he doesn't need to support farmers markets himself cus whenever he looks out of his window at home, there's on average 'four pheasants just sitting out there waiting for me to shoot them'. Of course, as with most of this blog, 'you had to be there', but you're not, so I'm giving you the facts. We have a moron in our midsts...

3. Hot Canadian chicks DO just come over and talk to us because they hear our British accents (I told you so!) It happened on the metro barely 6 hours ago. The fine specimen in question claimed to support the same hockey team as Pip. Anyway, she wished us luck, and we wished her a good day ma'am.

4. Most snow is of a poor quality, and not suited to snowball fights. However, Ma Nature kindly deposits ready-made snowballs so-you-don't-have-to, which are widely available, so you can still chuck them and have larks. Pip is a good target, Dave is a good throw, Heath prefers not to get involved.

5. My 12 years of French have not left their mark on me - I can't understand a bloody word they're saying over here. Education is a waste of time.

I'll leave it there for the time being. Wuvs babes, Bowell xx

Burger Blog #2 - Mega Mac

2010-01-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

A new year, a new start? Was it bollocks! The first port of call after last night's drunken haze was our old friend McDonalds. I was so famished I ordered a supersized Mega Mac Meal, which consisted of a DOUBLE Big Mac Burger (unavailable in the UK apart from at one restaurant in Manchester), a bucket of Coke and enough fries to feed the population of a small Irish village. It wasn't quite as appealing as the name or photos built it up to be, and was certainly no classic Double Cheese. However, it certainly hit the spot, and a second Mega Mac a few days later (purely for scientific research, I assure you) that was lusher means that this offering scores a respectable 8.5 Ronalds.

"The importance of being warmest" or "Toooooo cold toooooo go out"

2010-01-01T15:25:00.000-08:00

The temperature in Canada is a completely different animal to pretty much anything I've ever felt before. In England, where the extremes of cold never reach much beyond zero, the odd occasions where it dips to minus two or three are simply interesting. Here, where, on our first morning it was minus twenty nine, it's less a curio and more a physical force you spent practically all your time combatting.
The only real comparison I can think of is a time me and a few friends jumped into a lake in Windemere a few years ago. That kind of cold was quite scary- it was maybe four or five strokes back to the jetty; if it had been more than ten I doubt I would have made it. Hat, gloves and many, many layers here aren't just for comfort- they're necessary for survival. At minus twenty nine, you start to lose feeling in your hands within ten seconds, and the skin on the exposed parts of your face starts to physically hurt and tighten just as quickly. Today, when it's only been a wussy minus 8 or so, you get about enough time for a cigarette before you just have to get your hands out of the elements.
Consequently, it takes fucking ages to get ready before you go out. Just so you can get an idea of the chore this is, we've put together a step-by-step guide to dressing your very own Dave in Canada, complete with pictures of me looking like a twat who's pissed himself a little bit.

1. First, a t-shirt and the very finest in long-john technology, plus a watch that's broken but still looks cool.

2. What Dave would be complete without black skinnies and a AA hoody? None Dave, that's who.

3. Next, a super-warm cardigan and thermal socks. The fact the cardigan still has never been washed locks in the warmth.

4. This season's padded check shirt completes the top, while thick ski socks are a must for the feet. Thin gloves start the hands off.

5. With snow proof gloves comes comfort but not mobility, so get a friend to put that baby seal pelt on your head.

6. Next, nick Heather's scarf because it's phatter than yours.

7. Nick Pip's scarf too, put on boots, find another hat on the floor of the youth hostel and, last but not least, drape a sleeping bag over yourself. Congratulations, you're now ready to spend 10 minutes outside!

New Year's Eve, Montreal Style

2010-01-01T09:02:00.001-08:00

ZOMGZ it was amazing. One of my favourite New Year's ever. In Quebec you can only buy booze from a shop called SAQ, which is Government-run and only sells expensive wine and crappy imported beer. However, you can occasionally find a corner shop (or deppaneur en Francais) which has a license from SAQ to sell beer. We managed to find one that sold micro-carbonated (whatever the hell that is) Molson for relatively cheap, so got a crate of that, as well as two bottles of the cheapest red we could find. Then some guy called Fred, who looked like a trainee porn star, came into our hostel and gave everyone two bottles of beer, which was nice. A few drinking games with some hostel douches later (we nicknamed them Tits, Twat, Fatty and Leader) and we were merry enough to brave the cold and head to O'Haras, an Irish bar that some Aussie chums of ours had scoped out earlier in the day. Cue pitchers of beer a-plenty, some hilarious Jewish karaoke, and the world's lushest pizza, which was top-heavy with slabs of pepperoni the size of a baby's fist. BOSS! The only downsides were that I lost my kick-ass Cuban cigar and that the neighbourhood McDo's wasn't a 24 hour affair; we could've killed for some kind of a 10 Ronald at 3 in the morning.

Burger Blog #1 - La Belle Province Cheeseburger

2009-12-31T12:53:00.000-08:00

La Belle Province have created a bold, almost arrogant young burger, brimming with promise. The well-toasted buns, haughty and seeded, were a welcome addition, as was the freshly cooked patty. While the salad threatened to overwhelm the meat juices at times, the package was, all-in-all, a worthy challenger to the equivalent from McDo, and we award it a very respectable 7/10 Ronalds.

and so it begins

2009-12-31T11:34:00.001-08:00

Heather here, hi from Montreal. It's FREEZING, on our first morning here the wind chill of -29 shocked us into intense layering. Dave realised it was a good idea to buy thermals and Pip bought a wierd thug mask that covers almost every part of his face. Pictures to follow.
We did all the boring stuff like banks on the first day and then saw the beautiful park, Mont Royal and spent the best part of a day climbing to the top to see the whole city. We've already been accosted by an American racist I named 'Rusty' who shouted at us for not having visited San Fransisco and for not knowing what he meant by 'the match'. And we've already drunk a supersized beer from a litre can. Next stop, bacon and maple syrup. Happy New Year!

Three Play In Brighton

2009-12-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

Pip's a mega-spazz and broked his bag already. What a moron. Heath had a lovely trip on a train that ended up cheaper than Pip's lame-o megabus. Mega-spazz on a megabus. What a moron. Dave went to the station and had to wait 10 minutes before the two losers arrived and it fucking sucked. Then he phoned his daddy to come and pick them up. Then they drank beer, ate a pheasant and watched South Park. BOSS. So glad Bowell's not here.